Kristella is a recipient of the Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship for Diversity Program. She is a language and social interaction researcher who received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2022. Her dissertation entailed a micro-analysis of social interactions in a deaf or hard-of-hearing oral preschool classroom to explore the ways in which educators, parents, and children themselves understand and reinforce certain ideological beliefs and attitudes about spoken language and its use in social life. She is currently interested in identifying communicative practices and patterns that support interactions of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Her primary research methods are conversation analysis and ethnography.