About Me

( My last name is pronounced /’upadʰje/ with a voiced aspirated dental plosive /dʰ/, but /’upaðje/ or oo - pa - the - ye is fine too)

I’m a PhD candidate in Language Science at the University of California, Irvine, where I’m advised by Dr. Richard Futrell. Broadly speaking, I’m interested in understanding the representations and mechanisms underlying language use in humans and Large Language Models (LLMs). Presently, I’m fascinated by questions at the heart of language production — a process that seems deceptively easy, yet is tremendously complex because of the combinatorial explosion of choices at every turn. Much of my ongoing work — which draws on computational cognitive modeling, corpus analysis, and behavioral methods — focuses on how cognitive resource constraints and performance demands shape production choices.

Before coming to UC Irvine, I earned my Bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science, Machine Learning, and Neural Computation with a minor in Math at UC San Diego. During undergrad, I worked as a computational neurosciences intern at the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR), and later worked on investigating lexico-semantic, pragmatic, and discourse structure knowledge in LLMs. Understanding the representational and mechanistic properties of LLMs is still very much a key research interest of mine, and some of my current projects use linguistically motivated approaches to explore pragmatic reasoning and mutual intelligibility in multilingual LLMs.

Outside of research, I enjoy fiction (on the page and stage 🎭), board games, Blitz & Rapid chess battles, and skating on (not so thin) ice! ⛸️