is Associate Professor at Youngstown State University, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in language acquisition, sociolinguistics, Italian language and linguistics, and foreign language teaching methods. She is also the University Supervisor of student teachers of Spanish and Italian and program coordinator of Foreign Language Education in the Beeghly College of Education (BCOE). She is active in the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and the Ohio Foreign Language Association (OFLA), where she serves on the Teacher Education and Licensure Committee.

Her research interests lie in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and foreign language teacher training. In SLA, she researches second language processing and has conducted research on grammatical gender processing and eye-tracking. In foreign language teacher education, she researches teacher candidate performance and perceptions on the World Language edTPA.

She is co-author of an introductory SLA textbook (with Susan Gass and Luke Plonsky) and co-editor of a volume on salience in SLA (with Susan Gass and Patti Spinner). Her work has appeared in Foreign Language Annals, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and several book chapters.