Aaron Santa María obtained his European Joint Master's Degree in Clinical Linguistics from the University of Groningen, Ghent University, and the University of Eastern Finland in 2024, specializing in neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and clinical linguistics. For his master's thesis, he investigated the spoken production and predictive processing of the Spanish differential object marking (e.g., abraza a la mujer vs. abraza ø el árbol) among school-age heritage speakers of Spanish in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. In line with this, he continues to collaborate with the Center for Language, Brain and Learning at UiT–The Arctic University of Norway in the Heritage Language Acquisition project with Dr. Brechje van Osch.
In 2024, Aaron received an FWO PhD fellowship grant for his project 'Towards an integrative account of English-Tagalog intra-word code-switching' at Ghent University under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Renata Enghels, Prof. Dr. Robert Hartsuiker and Dr. María del Carmen Parafita Couto (Leiden University). In his PhD project, he is studying the intra-word code-switching structures as spoken by various speech communities in the Philippines and their underlying linguistic processes using innovative approaches from corpus linguistics, experimental psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics.
In addition to his research experience, Aaron has had several stints as an educator. From 2020 to 2022, he worked for the Spanish Ministry of Education as a bilingual language assistant in the public education sector in Madrid. Concurrently, he also worked as a lecturer of Spanish at the University of the Philippines.
