Early career
I did a MA in Applied Linguistics at Universidad de Puebla-Mexico (Mexico). In my dissertation I combined my interest in sign languages and psycholinguistics by designing a priming study in Mexican Sign Language (LSM).
In 2008 I started my PhD at the Deafness, Cognition, and Language Research Centre and University College London (UK) under the supervision of Gary Morgan and Benice Woll. My dissertation focused on how iconcity influences learning and processing of British Sign Language (BSL).
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In 2012, I got a 2-year postdoctoral position with Asli Özyürek at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (the Netherlands). In this project, we studied the effect of iconicity in the acquisition of Turkish Sign Language (TID) in deaf children. In 2014, I secured a Veni grant from the Dutch Science Foundation (250,000 euros) to study how gesture influences sign learning.
Current position
In 2018, I joined the department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham (UK) where I am a senior lecturer (associate professor) in psycholinguistics. My research focuses broadly on sign languages and gesture and how iconicity modulates processes of language learning and processing. I teach BA and MA modules on research methods, sign languages and gesture. I am General Secretary of the International Society for Gesture Studies and member of the Editorial Board of the journal Sign Language and Linguistics
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