I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Linguistics. My current research, funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), focuses on the phonological awareness and reading skills of deaf children. I specialize in the early communication, Flemish Sign Language (VGT) acquistion and literacy in deaf children, and have published and presented my research for both academic and mainstream audiences. I also teach the course 'Inleiding tot de Vlaamse Gebarentaal' (Introduction to Flemish Sign Language). I am currently also involved in a research project at KU Leuven on the establishment of bilingual education Dutch - Flemish Sign Language (O&O, funded by the Dept. of Education, Flanders).
Previously I was a postdoctoral Academia Belgica fellow funded by the academia and the FWO for which I worked in collaboration with prof. dr. O. Capirci at the Language and Communication Across Modalities laboratory in Rome (LaCAM, ISTC-CNR). In 2019, I was a postdoctoral fellow of the Mayberry laboratory for multimodal language development at UC San Diego (USA). In 2018, I obtained an interdisciplinary PhD in Linguistics and in Health Sciences at Ghent University (supervised by prof. dr. M. Van Herreweghe and prof. dr. K. Van Lierde). During which I was a visiting scholar at Gallaudet University (Washington DC, USA) working in close collaboration with prof. dr. D. Chen Pichler, prof. dr. T. Allen and prof. dr. L. Simms.
