Hello! I’m a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience (Cognition & Cognitive Neuroscience area). My primary affiliation is with the Motivated Cognition & Aging Brain Lab under the mentorship of Gregory Samanez-Larkin, Ph.D.

Research Areas

• Basic mechanisms of motivation and decision making
  • What brain circuits support valuation mechanisms?
  • How do individual differences in dopamine neurotransmission affect how people weigh benefits and costs?
  • What role does dopamine play in prosocial decisions and strategic social learning?
  • How do neural circuits support context-specific motivation in affiliative and competitive social environments?
• Translation to everyday life
  • Does neural function shape spontaneous decisions outside the lab?
  • How do experiences with discrimination and power dynamics in the workplace motivate prosocial choices?
  • What are the mechanisms and consequences of personal and systemic bias in law and criminal justice?
  • How and when do narratives shape economic and legal decisions?

Tools/Techniques

• Neuroimaging (fMRI, PET)
• Human pharmacology
• Computational modeling
• Ecological momentary assessment
• Natural language processing
• Public data/tweet scraping
• Computer vision