At the University of Colorado I earned an MA in German. My goal at UC Berkeley is to obtain a PhD in Germanic Linguistics. I am interested in historical linguistics, and more specifically, language typology and language variation. The traditional approach to accounting for language diversity in Europe has been divergence theory, that languages descend from an ancestral language and develop innovations in isolation. My approach to language diversity in Europe considers recent scholarship in archaeology. I believe that cultural exchange has been underestimated as a source of linguistic diversity in Europe and that an examination of Germanic origins would support such a position. My interests outside of academia include travel. I journey once a year to Europe, in part to practice German, and more importantly, to visit family. I am also an active member of my church.