Hello! My name is Marco and I am a researcher and educator. 

I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese at Whitman College. I hold a PhD in Linguistics with a concentration in Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), as well as a Graduate Certificate in Computational Linguistics from the same university. At UIUC, I worked under the direction of professors José Ignacio Hualde and Lane Schwartz. Broadly speaking, in my research I investigate learning as a cognitive and social process and how such a process can be compared to machine learning. In my dissertation, more specifically, I investigated the acquisition of the sounds of Japanese by native speakers of English from computational and experimental perspectives. To complete my dissertation, I received a Japanese Studies Fellowship from the Japan Foundation to conduct research at the Electrical Engineering and Information Systems Department of the University of Tokyo (UTokyo) under the supervision of Professors Nobuaki Minematsu. Such an interdisciplinary approach to linguistic research stems from my multi-cultural background: I was born and raised in Brazil and before joining UIUC, I completed my M.A. in linguistics at UTokyo. My MA was conducted entirely in Japanese, and I was fully funded by the Japanese government. I am also an avid language learner, being fully proficient in Portuguese, English, Japanese and Spanish. I can also communicate in German and Korean. I’m currently working on improving my Korean! 

My hobbies include playing video games and riding my bike.

For further information, please check out my CV here.  

About me

This photo was taken at the Latin American Memorial in São Paulo, Brazil. The sculpture is called Mão (“Hand”) and was designed by Oscar Niemeyer. It is inspired by the book Las venas abiertas de América Latina (“Open veins of Latin America”), by Eduardo Galeano. Being an immigrant from Brazil in the United States is extremely difficult and this sculpture touches me deeply.