News

2018-01-04 Dissertation Defense

I defended my dissertation today and passed! Yay! (Trust me. I am a Doctor)

My dissertation is on modeling individual differences in real-world visual expertise. I recruited a group of wonderful bird watchers online, with varying levels of expertise. First, I measured their expertise level using psychometric models. Then I modeled the time course of their categorization behavior, and found that experts were faster mainly because they can accumulate evidence faster. Then I modeled the underlying representations and found that experts and novices differed in a quantitative rather than qualitative fashion: they shared the same space but weighted the dimensions differently.

2017-04-25 Start Now Tutor Training

I attended the Start Now tutor training at the Nashville Adult Literacy Council today and can officially start volunteering as a tutor. The Nashville Adult Literacy Council is a nonprofit organization that teaches adult Americans to read and teaches adult immigrants the English language. I am grateful that I get this opportunity to help people in the community.

2017-04-06 Intern with axialHealthcare

I am very excited to start working as an intern with the Research and Data Scientist Group at axialHealthcare! axial is a start-up company here at Nashville. They take a data analytical approach to solve the serious issues in pain care. I always wanted to use my skills with data and my psychology background in real-world settings to improve people's well-being. Couldn't be happier with this opportunity! Thanks Chad for bringing this opening to my attention and your help along my application! Thanks Dr. Ashley Brady from the BRET office and Dr. Ruth Schemmer from Vanderbilt Graduate School for your guidance and assistance throughout my application!

2017-04-03 SQL Certification

I had fun completing the Vertabelo Academy “Window Functions” course, learned analytic functions such as PARTITION BY, ORDER BY, and OVER to deeply understand data. See my certification here.

2017-03-16 SQL Certification

Just completed the Vertabelo Academy “SQL Queries” course and Vertabelo Academy “Operating on Data in SQL” course. Very glad to brush up my SQL skills with these two courses! Thanks Rui for sharing the course information!

2016-08-04 IU Young Scientist Award

I am very glad to receive the IU Young Scientist Travel Award to attend the 2016 Annual Meetings of the the Society for Mathematical Psychology in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

2016-05-30 Lisa M. Quesenberry Scholarship

I'm honored to be a recipient of the Lisa M. Quesenberry Scholarship. See a description of the scholarship here. Thank you Dr. Thomas Palmeri and Dr. Isabel Gauthier for writing me recommendation letters and being wonderful role models throughout my Ph.D. career!

2015-04-21 The William F. Hodges Teaching Assistant Award

I am honored to receive the William F. Hodges Teaching Assistant Award together with Yao Jiang, with whom I co-TAed for one semester. Thank you Dr. Thomas Palmeri, Dr. Adriane Seiffert, Dr. Geoff Woodman, and Dr. Sonya Sterba on you suggestions and guidance for my TAship!

2013-07-05 APCV Travel Award

I am very glad to be a recipient of the APCV Travel Award for the 9th Asia-Pacific Conference on Vision (APCV 2013) in Suzhou, China. Great conference. Glad to catch up with so many colleagues!