Where I am.
In fall 2025, I began working as an Assistant Professor in the department of Neuroscience, Cognition, and Behavior at the University of San Diego in sunny San Diego, CA. In my research, I apply deep learning models to behavior and neuroimaging to investigate how people experience emotions from the things they see and hear. In my teaching, I develop courses on the foundations of statistical intuition and computational techniques for junior behavioral scientists. At any given moment, I’m probably drinking from a very large cup of tea.
If you are a USD undergraduate, I will be recruiting research assistants. And for external scientists, I am always open to potential research collaborations. To learn more, please visit my lab website!
Previously:
In 2013 I started working as a research assistant on a media multitasking & cognition project with Dr. Melina Uncapher, then a research associate in Dr. Anthony Wagner’s Memory Lab, during my freshman year at Stanford University. She couldn’t get rid of me, and I continued working with her in the lab throughout undergrad, earning two undergraduate summer fellowships through Stanford (PsychSummer and Bio-X) so I would literally never have to leave. I completed my bachelor’s degree in three years, serving as an undergraduate Teaching Fellow for Psych One, Stanford’s introductory psychology course, during my third year, while also completing an honors thesis under Drs. Uncapher and Wagner.
After graduation in 2015, I transitioned into a full-time lab manager + research assistant position in the Memory Lab. As lab manager/RA, I served as a jack-of-most-trades, handling various arms of data collection and analysis for our healthy aging study, maintaining lab needs both tangible (office supplies, copies, uncomfortable amounts of coffee) and intangible (IRB protocols, software licenses, moral support), and defusing tense meetings with horrible jokes. I also spent some time assisting Dr. Uncapher with data processing and statistics for her educational neuroscience projects with the Neuroscape group at UC San Francisco.
In fall 2017, I began working on my PhD in Dr. Kevin Ochsner’s Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience Lab at Columbia University, which I completed in spring 2022. From 2017-2019, I co-managed an informal R users club in the department, where I helped to organize a yearly coding bootcamp and bi-weekly meetings/workshops to enrich our collective R experience. During my first post-PhD summer, I taught The Science of Psychology: Explorations and Applications, a class I originally co-designed with Dr. Caroline Marvin, at Columbia.
After finishing my PhD in 2022, I began a FIRST-funded postdoctoral fellowship working in Dr. Phil Kragel’s ECCO Lab at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. As part of my fellowship, I completed research training at Emory as well as pedagogical training at Spelman College, where I developed an advanced statistics course teaching the regression framework of inferential statistics.
Sadly, the NIH IRACDA postdoctoral training program, of which FIRST at Emory was a part, was terminated nationwide along with many other scientific training grants as of April 2025. I concluded my postdoctoral training in summer 2025, and am proud to be one of the final fellows whose research and teaching training were funded by FIRST.
Some of my code.
Check out my GitHub to see the code projects I’ve contributed to.
A snapshot of my CV.
(Click here for the full-page version. Made with the vitae package!)
