I received my bachelors degree in Psychology from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany in 1999. I received my Masters degree in cognitive psychology in 2003 from the University of Pittsburgh. I am interested in the development of word representations and the effect of both external (reading environment) and internal (reading skill) influences on the formation of these representations. I am also interested in the role of semantics in low level word reading skills (e.g., the way in which readers activate appropriate semantics from print) as well as in higher level comprehension skills (e.g., how deficits in semantic processing will affect text comprehension). I use behavioral, eye-tracking and ERP methodologies to investigate these issues in both children and adults.