Research Interests:
Hannah is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. She earned her M.A. in Spanish Linguistics from New Mexico State University in 2021 and her B.A. in Spanish from Bowling Green State University in 2017. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, Hannah worked as a Project Coordinator training multilingual AI systems with a focus on linguistic variation and language-specific nuances. She has also provided Spanish and Portuguese transcription and translation services for legal contexts and has developed and taught courses in Introduction to Linguistics, Language and Society, and Linguistics and Healthcare. In addition, Hannah is a Nationally Registered Emergency Medical Technician with five years of 911 emergency medical services experience.
Hannah’s research interests lie at the intersection of sociolinguistics, bilingualism, artificial intelligence, and healthcare communication. Her current interests include examining how AI systems process and represent code-switching, investigating semantic shifts in loanwords and their treatment by language technologies, and applying sociolinguistic and discourse analytic approaches to healthcare communication. Through this work, she seeks to better understand how language technologies can more accurately reflect the linguistic realities of bilingual speakers and how communication practices affect healthcare accessibility, patient outcomes, provider-patient interactions, and interprofessional collaboration.
