About

I am currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Washington working in the Vision + Cognition group with Ione Fine in the Department of Psychology, and our collaborator Kristina Tarczy-Hornoch in the Department of Ophthalmology. Broadly, I am investigating how the visual parts of the brain develop and change when a person has prolonged atypical visual experience during childhood, such as in amblyopia ("lazy" eye) or strabismus (an eye turn).

I completed my PhD training at the University of British Columbia working in the Giaschi Lab at BC Children's Hospital. There, I conducted research on motion perception and stereopsis. We conduct studies with children and adults, and people with typical or atypical visual experience, to understand how these processes develop. One of the many fun parts of working here was taking all the usual psychophysical procedures we use with adults, and applying them to children — it turns out a psychophysical experiment is very similar to a video game. For more, see research.

I conducted my undergraduate studies at Simon Fraser University working out of Mark Blair's Cognitive Science Lab, which studies attention in learning and expertise. I was very fortunate to be a part of a lab that encouraged students to go beyond their typical undergraduate training to engage in research and self-directed learning. I also did some work with Steven Brown while he was a postdoctoral fellow in Mario Liotti's Laboratory for Developmental Neuroscience. He now heads McMaster's NeuroArts Lab with a fascinating research program studying music, dance, and other arts using the tools of a cognitive neuroscientist.

Throughout my academic career, I have been generously funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada through two Undergraduate Student Research Awards and through the Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship Program at the Masters and PhD levels. I am very grateful.