Elana Pontecorvo is a PhD student in the Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences PhD program. She holds an EdM in Deaf Education from Boston University. She joined the LAVA Lab to pursue her interest in sign language acquisition, and was the lab manager for the LAVA Lab and Dr. Naomi Caselli’s Lex Lab before beginning her doctoral studies. She is interested in how deaf children with hearing families acquire sign language as a first language. She strives to conduct research which can be applied to ensure early language access for deaf and hard of hearing children.