I didn't enter college wanting to be a psychologist. At the University of Virginia, I stumbled upon the idea that psychology could be research focused when I happened to take Dr. Daniel Willingham's cognitive psychology course. I fell in love with social psychology in Dr. Timothy Wilson's introduction to social psychology course. And I had the opportunity to work with fabulous research mentors Dr. Daniel Wegner and Dr. Bella DePaulo as research assistants and then on my senior thesis ("Agentic Shift as a Clue to the Loss of Feeling of Voluntary Behavior") which sealed the deal for my love of psychological science.

My experiences as an undergraduate research assistant in these labs helped prepare me for graduate school in Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College where I again worked with talented social psychology research mentors:  Dr. Todd Heatherton, Dr. Jay Hull, and Dr. Robert Kleck. My dissertation ("The Effect of Movie Smoking on Smoking Attitudes and Behavior") expanded to applied social psychology through my collaborations with Dr. James Sargent and Dr. Madeleine Dalton at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

As a faculty member, I seek to provide research experiences to undergraduate students because I recognize how important those experiences were to my own growth:  intellectually, interpersonally, and professionally. I love mentoring research and I hope my enthusiasm helps students to realize they, too, can find joy in psychological research! If you are considering research in social psychology, I'd be happy to talk with you about opportunities in my lab.