Dr. Kimi Nakatsukasa was born in Kyoto, Japan, and she completed her bachelor’s degree at Sophia University in Japan. In 2006, she completed her Master’s degree at Georgetown University. She joined the Second Language Studies program at Michigan State University in 2006, and completed her doctorate, entitled Efficacy of gestures and recasts on the acquisition of L2 grammar, in 2013 under the supervision of Shawn Loewen; Susan Gass, Debra Hardison and Paula Winke also served on her dissertation committee. Her dissertation was one of the few studies to combine nonverbal behavior with corrective feedback research, and she pushed the boundaries even further by designing a quasi-experimental study that investigated the effectiveness of combining gestures with oral corrective feedback on English past tense and locative preposition.