Nicole Mirea

I’m a Linguistics PhD candidate at Northwestern University with an anticipated graduation date of December 2022; my advisor is Matt Goldrick. Since 2017, I’ve been investigating how language learners use what they already know to help them learn sound patterns of a new language, through experiments with both human participants and deep learning models.

I’ve also analyzed survey data for social good, in partnership with Bilingualism Matters Chicago and graduate student organizations at Northwestern. In 2020, I did a summer data science internship at Duolingo, where I worked with a cross-functional team to identify learning trajectories and strategies employed by users. Before graduate school, I was a front-end web developer/designer for UCLA’s Center for Tropical Research and Institute of the Environment & Sustainability.

In English, my last name rhymes with “lira,” and my full name is pronounced [ni’kʰɔl ‘miɹə]. My last name comes from Romanian, which is one of my two native languages (alongside English).