About Me
( My last name is pronounced /’upadʰje/ with a voiced aspirated dental stop /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).
Currently, I’m fascinated by a paradox at the heart of how we produce language — a process that seems deceptively easy, but is actually tremendously complex (decisions, decisions, every step of the way). In particular, 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. While at UCSD, I 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 LLMs.