Hi there, Thanks for your interest in the PLUM Lab and its grad students - and I can tell you right away that it has nothing to do with plum fruits, except that we like the acronym and have plum-colored markers, towels and liquid disinfectant.

The current project I am working on, when not having plum fun, is aimed at detecting and enhancing implicit learning in beginner learners of a second language. In many situations humans are able to learn and employ knowledge without conscious awareness -- we want to tap into this process experimentally using ERPs (event-related brain potentials) to measure subject's brain waves as they perform judgment tasks on sentences written in Spanish.

Language processing in the brain is a fascinating topic to me and I don't think one needs to be multilingual or even bilingual to be interested in it. I happen to be both as I grew up in a country where this is a common reality - Cape Verde Islands (West Africa). I came to the US to pursue a college education and had not the slightest hint that I would end up in a PhD program in Cognitive Psychology/Neuroscience -- my undergraduate major at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, was in the field of MIS (Management Information Systems). I couldn't be happier with my grad school decision and new passion (i.e. the brain/mind) and I'm grateful that I have the opportunity to pursue it here at Pitt (and PLUM Lab, of course).

I suppose a personal webpage is not much of one without the indispensable hobbies, so I'll tell you that, on the days that my graduate career is a bit less than rosy, I like to distract myself by doing ridiculous amounts of pleasure reading in addition to the assigned ones; assemble tangrams; listen to and play music; and of course dance myself away to the rhythms of African drums.

Oh, and I love ice cream!