I'm currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Bucharest and a postdoc at the University of Vienna in the SFB project Language between Redundancy and Deficiency, specifically, in subproject TP6 The (Non-)Deficiency and (Non-)Redundancy of Clitic Pronouns (led by Dalina Kallulli). I am also a collaborator of the LeibnizDream project (https://leibnizdream.eu/), delving into the primitives of language thought by investigating child language. As an active member of the Recursion Group at the Language Acquisition Lab at UMass Amherst, I work with Tom Roeper, Deborah Foucault and Usha Lakshmanan to investigate recursion in children. I have also recently led a Young Researchers' Team Project funded by UEFISCDI on the Acquisition of Disjunction in Romanian (see website), collaborating with Lyn Tieu, Andreea Nicolae and Anton Benz.

 I hold a PhD from Ca' Foscari University Venice on theories of denominal verbs (supervised by Prof. Alessandra Giorgi). I held various grants, fellowships and positions so far, including a Fulbright  Visiting Scholar position at UMass Amherst (working on agreement attraction errors with Brian Dillon) and a visiting research fellowship and a postdoctoral position in semantics and pragmatics at ZAS Berlin (working with Anton Benz). For a comprehensive view of my history, please see my cv.

I'm mostly interested in how children acquire language, in particular, how they are able to handle linguistic items that lexicalize logical operators (such as disjunction, modality, negation, quantification, etc.) or lexical concepts (such as denominal verbs), as well as important linguistic operations (such as recursion or agreement). In my investigation, I have tried to create or use experimental paradigms that tap into children's innate preferences in a natural way (e.g. nonce word paradigms for denominals or disjunction, coloring tasks for disjunction and quantification, a shadow play paradigm for epistemic modality, a.m.o.). I am a firm believer that investigating first language acquisition can shed light on fundamental questions regarding the basic foundations and structure of language.

From a broader psycholinguistic perspective, I am also interested in psycholinguistic phenomena (such as agreement attraction) and in psycholinguistic methods (such as speeded forced choice tasks, self-paced reading tasks, and, recently, eye-tracking). 

My hobbies include travelling (Australia has been one of my favourite destinations so far), listening to music (especially indie bands or singers (The National, The Editors, The Bleachers, Snow Patrol, The Strokes, or Phoebe Bridgers), but also chillout music (Hiatus, Shura, Oklou), shoegaze (Slowdive), dream pop (Still Corners), 80s synth music or more modern versions (Cannons, Drab Majesty), and smooth jazz), photography (especially nature photography but not only), art (especially Chagall, Magritte),  reading poetry (Naomi Shihab Nye, Neruda, e.e.cummings, sufi poetry like Hafiz or Rumi, Walt Whitman, Frank O. Hara, etc.) or watching films that touch your heart and make you think about the meaning of life (Schindler's List, The Constant Gardener, Past Lives, Dogman, Mar adentro, Caótica Ana, and many others).