BIO: Olena Drozd Olena Drozd is originally from Ukraine; she was born and raised in Odessa, in the southern part of Ukraine. She studied English language and literature at Odessa State University and received her BA in 1987. She worked as an English instructor at Odessa State Marine University until she, her husband, and daughter relocated to Miami, Florida in 1999. She entered the Master's Program in Linguistics in 2001 and graduated in the Spring '03 term. Olena's main interest in linguistics lies in the field of phonology and second language acquisition. As a partial fulfillment of her degree, she wrote and defended the Master's thesis "Sonority and its role in the acquisition of complex coda clusters by Spanish speakers learning English as a second language". She plans to continue her studies at the Ph.D. level. In addition to receiving the 2003 Truby Award, Olena is a recipient of '2002 Arts and Science Academic Award'.
