Hi! I'm a postdoc at Princeton working with Adele Goldberg and Tom Griffiths. Previously, I earned my Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, advised by Gary Lupyan. I also visited Bill Thompson's lab at UC Berkeley in 2024. My research focuses on understanding how human and artificial minds flexibly draw similarities between seemingly unrelated things and make analogical inferences, using both empirical methods and computational models. Before my PhD in psychology, I earned a Master of Science degree in Statistics and a Bachelor of Arts in English.

Currently, several questions keep me awake at night: 

How do we infer hidden connections between concepts or sensory phenomenons? 

Science is green, philosophy is purple; Bach is blue, and heavy metal is black. When asked to choose a color that best describes a certain subject or music genre, people consistently do so. These cross-domain mappings permeate our lives through the metaphorical usage of language and multisensory integration. How do we create these mappings? What are the connections between different forms of cross-domain mappings?

How is our ability to draw similarities affected by/learned from language? 

Does language merely reflect pre-existing similarities, enabling us to describe and communicate them? Or does it fundamentally shape the way we perceive, structure, and form these similarities in our minds? To what extent does the similarity we perceive depend on our experience with and use of language?

How do word meanings evolve? Why some words are more "metaphorical" than others?

Word meanings evolve through a dynamic process influenced by cultural changes, technological advancements, and shifts in societal norms. Over time, words can acquire new meanings, lose old ones, or develop additional connotations. This evolution is often driven by the need to communicate new concepts or experiences and can result from metaphorical extensions where a word used in one context is applied to another, seemingly unrelated context. But what kind of words tend to be extended in meaning, and why can't certain words be extended in the same way? For example, despite being used contrastively, why do we only have "small talk" but not "little talk," "big talk," or "large talk"?

How drawing similarities between scientific domains can facilitate the evolution of intelligence? 

Historical breakthroughs often stem from cross-domain analogies. Newton's laws of motion and universal gravitation, for instance, provided a metaphorical framework for understanding complex systems without visible direction. Adam Smith and Charles Darwin both drew on Newtonian principles to explain how individual actions or traits, guided by no obvious orchestrator, can lead to societal or evolutionary advancement, respectively. What analogies are we thinking by now, and what are underexplored analogies that could foster novel research avenues and inspire a paradigm shift in human/artificial intelligence?