Kayla Palakurthy '09

After graduating, I joined Teach for America and spent two years teaching middle school in a small community in New Mexico on the Navajo Nation. I then moved to San Francisco where I taught 8th grade algebra at a KIPP charter school for another two years. In 2013, I decided to go back to school and graduated with my PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2019. My husband (another Dartmouth '09!) and I now live in Berkeley, and I am a postdoctoral research fellow at UC Davis. My research focuses on sociolinguistic variation, bilingualism, and language change in Diné Bizaad (Navajo).