Ricardo I. Ortiz Román (El/He) is a Puerto Rican Deaf community grown interpreter for 21 years. He obtained his NIC in 2010 and BEI Trilingual (ASL-Spanish-English) Advanced certificate in 2017. He is a doctoral candidate at Gallaudet University working on the effects of cognates on the cognition of multimodal-multilingual interpreters. His other research interests include sign language interpretation in Puerto Rico, LSPR signs etymology, psycholinguistic aspects of interpreting, and sociocultural aspects of interpreting.