I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Psychology Department at Tufts University, currently supported by an NIH National Research Service Award. From January to May 2012, I am visiting Stanford's Psychology Department with Nalini Ambady. Starting July 2012, I will be Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Dartmouth.

 
* If you are interested in joining my lab at Dartmouth in Fall 2012 as a post-doc or full-time RA/lab manager, see here for more information.



Research
I investigate the cognitive and neural basis of our ability to extract information about other people through facial, vocal, and bodily cues. People's faces, for example, contain very little statistical variation in terms of gross structure and features, and yet the subtlest of cues convey incredible amounts of information, like another's sex, race, emotional state, intentions, and personality characteristics. My research examines the underlying mechanisms through which the brain gives rise to these rapid perceptions of others. I am especially interested in how such perceptions evolve and stabilize in real time; how they are influenced by multiple sensory cues; and how visual processing interacts with high-level cognition and prior social and cultural knowledge to shape the basic ways we see and understand other people. I take an integrative and multi-level approach in examining these phenomena, incorporating insights across social psychology and the cognitive, vision, and neural sciences. My investigations make use of a wide range of methodologies, including neuroimaging, event-related brain potentials, computer mouse-tracking, and computational modeling. (More)