Aida Sakalauskaite is a fith year graduate student in the Germanic Linguistics Program. She passed her QEs in Spring of 2007. She has a BA in German linguistics from Vilnius University, Lithuania; MA in Germanic Linguistics from UC Berkeley. She is a co-chair (with Donald Backman)of the 14th Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference, "Ossi Wessi", which was held at UC Berkeley on March18-19, 2006. Aida Sakalauskaite and Donald Backman are both co-authors of the book "Ossi Wessi" which will be published in Spring of 2008. Aida Sakalauskaite has presented the paper title "On musical semiotics: music as a kind of communication (based on Rimsky-Korsakovs 'Scheherazade') and the healing power of music (based on Theodorakis 'Zorba the Greek')" at the California Circle of Semiotics in Berkeley, in January of 2005 . She presented the paper title "Anglisizms in German" at the PAMLA conference held at Pepperdine University in February 2005. She also presented the results of the Bay Area German project with a group of her fellows graduate students at the Linguistic Roundtable in 2004 and 2006 as well as published these results in Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistic and Semiotic analysis. She is currently working on her dissertation as well as teaching German language courses at UCB.