I am a linguist, researcher, and Continuing Lecturer in Linguistics, currently at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

I am interested in non-standard, minority and endangered languages as well as research topics in formal linguistics (morphosyntax) and language technologies (machine translation and semantic networks) .

From 2021 to 2024 I was an AI Machine Learning Data linguist at AWS. Since 2025 I am a language engineer researcher at the VA Hospital in the Greater Los Angeles area.

My research fueled my fieldwork, and in 2010 it took me to São Paulo, Brazil, where I met the largest population of speakers of my native dialect outside Italy.

During my postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge, I studied little-known endangered Greek and Italian dialects in Apulia and Calabria (Italy). The project, “Fading Voices in Southern Italy“, was funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Our co-authored book “Greek-Romance Language Contact in Southern Italy” is about to be published (ETA: December 2026).

Additionally, my research interests include comparative Indo-European and Romance Linguistics, non-standard Italian varieties, Greek dialectology, and linguistic theory. Lesser-known, minority, endangered, and heritage languages represent my main empirical target. I am interested in linguistic formal approached centered on the intersection between morpho-phonology and syntax. I have applied the findings of the most recent research on the syntax-phonology interface to the assessment of specific phenomena attested in Italo-Romance: I investigated particular effects of consonantal length (raddoppiamento fonosintattico), tonic vowel alteration (metaphony), propagation, and prosodic variation.

Please see my full CV and publication list.