About Me

I am an experimental psychology PhD student at UC San Diego. Broadly, I am interested in humans as a social species, and how our social behavior often outmatches many others. We devote years of our lives to care for the youngest among us; we protect our closest social partners from what seem to be possible fates. My research focuses on these kind of phenomena, and takes a developmental angle to shed light on the cognitive building blocks necessary to understand cornerstones of the social world.

My recent work is on the developmental emergence of intuitive theories – implicit, theory-like frameworks used to make sense of the world, which commonly diverge from reality. I focus on two theories that often intersect: an intuitive theory of social relationships, and an intuitive theory of protection. Examples of these theories include how people expect close social partners to act exceptionally prosocial (as compared to strangers), even though close partners 'harm' us more often and in exceptionally particular ways; and how people praise protective parents for restricting their children's 'risky' choices, and condemn permissive parents even when things end up all right, despite never knowing how those choices would have turned out otherwise.

In parallel, I study early understanding of the physical world: Both how we come to extract social information from traces others left behind; and how we explain and predict navigation of the physical terrain across social contexts.

Before UCSD, I completed my BS in psychology with biological emphasis at UC Davis, then worked as a research assistant at Yale University and as a lab manager at UC Santa Barbara. As a graduate student, I am funded through the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, the UCSD Jacobs Endowed Fellowship, and the UCSD Morgan Endowed Fellowship.