About
I am a mixed methods researcher with 7+ years of experience researching human behavior and psychology. I am currently a PhD Student at UPenn in the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab . I have also conducted user research in the gaming industry at Riot Games where I researched complex patterns in user behavior that drove the design of new features.
Open to work late 2024!
Download my resume
Interests
- Quantitative and qualitative methods
- Data analysis, visualization, statistics
- Understanding how people/users think
Education
PhD in Psychology, Dec 2024
University of Pennsylvania
MA in Psychology, 2020
University of Pennsylvania
BSc in Psychology, Book & Media Studies, 2018
University of Toronto
Selected Projects
Select a project to read more
Our memories are not perfect recordings of the past. But instead are prone to error, misinformation, and bias. As part of my PhD, I have been identifying what memories are most susceptible to such errors. By combining behavioral experiments, fMRI, and neural networks, we show that similar memory errors exist in both humans and machines. We also find that these biases are not random mistakes, but are a product of an optimal learning system.
From school to work, we spend a lot of time indoors. In this wide-scale collaboration between psychologists, engineers, and chemists, we are researching how everyday fluctuations in indoor air quality impacts cognition. We find that CO2, as well as common household fragrance products, negatively impact decision-making. This work provides actionable insights into why good building ventilation is so important.
Not a morning person? Most people below the age of 30 would say so. But, in this collaboration with Harvard Medical School, we tested whether or not college students do in fact learn and process information worse in the morning. Remarkably, we find that the morning is actually the best time to learn new information, especially when we have to go beyond what we learned, and transfer it to new scenarios.
Publications
Quickly discover relevant content by filtering publications.
(2022).
Dividing attention hurts learning in adults but not children.
In PsyArXiv.
(2022).
The impact of emissions from an essential oil diffuser on cognitive performance.
In Indoor Air.
(2021).
Distributed representations for human inference.
In bioRxiv.
(2021).
Examining the effects of time of day and sleep on generalization.
In PLoS ONE.
(2020).
Distributed representations for human inference.
In Cog Sci.
(2020).
Indoor CO2 concentrations and cognitive function: A critical review.
In Indoor Air.
(2018).
Human Cognition, Patterning and Deacon’s Absentials: The Value of Absent-Mindedness in the Sense of Minding What Is Absent.
In Philosophies.
(2018).
Thinking in Patterns and the Pattern of Human Thought as Contrasted with AI Data Processing.
In Information.
For Fun
Patterns across video game players in character preferences
As a personal project, I extracted player data from a public API of a popular video game to explore player preferences in what kinds of characters they like to play. Analysis code and visualizations can be found
here.
My brain in the palm of my hand
3D printed by transforming a MRI scan of my brain into a printable model using my labmate’s
code.
Painted by me. Not actual brain’s size.
