Congratulations to Ms. Aubrey Villanueva, UTRGV alum and former CoBiVa research assistant, who is starting her first semester at the University of Colorado Boulder MA Linguistics program!

Ms. Aubrey Villanueva completed her BA in English with a concentration in Linguistics and minor in Legal Studies and graduated magna cum laude in 2020 from University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Aubrey is a proud native of the Rio Grande Valley. During her time at UTRGV, she contributed to the development of the Corpus Bilingue del Valle (CoBiVa) as a research assistant, intern, and contributor. Together with Dr. Katherine Christoffersen and Dr. Ryan Bessett, she conducted qualitative research on the impact of involving students in the corpus building process in community engaged scholarship courses. She presented her findings at many conferences, such as the UTRGV Linguistics Seminar Series, E^2 Symposium, National Symposium for Spanish as a Heritage Language (NSSHL), and Linguistics Association of the Southwest (LASSO). Together, they are co-authoring a manuscript for submission this year.

It comes as no surprise to us that Aubrey has been awarded a fellowship from the University of Colorado Boulder Graduate School program for her MA degree. This Fall, she is beginning her graduate career by studying language discrimination in social interaction through the Corpus for Language Discrimination in Interaction (CLDI), which is currently in development at UC Boulder. 

Congratulations, Aubrey, and good luck in your studies and research!