Academics:

I recently completed a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from UC Irvine, advised by Dr. Emily Grossman. Our research focuses on your ability to guess what other people may be thinking or feeling, and how that is supported by the structure and function of the brain. We use a mixture of fMRI and eye tracking data to make inferences about what visual features drive the interpretation of others’ actions.

The long-term goal of this research is to understand the implementation of Theory of Mind in the human brain well enough to simulate it in a computer. Modern computer vision algorithms can identify people and objects, but not necessarily actions, and certainly not the mental states that motivated those actions. However, people perform all three of those computations almost reflexively. By studying the brain activity associated with mental-state inference and the visual features that lead to breakdowns in this ability, we can create a model of how it generally unfolds. Once we have a mechanistic understanding of how humans solve this problem, we can try to imitate that solution elsewhere, whether that means improving AI or alleviating deficits stemming from brain damage.

My undergraduate research at CSUN under Dr. Stefanie Drew focused on synesthesia, as well as the possible sources of headaches and eyestrain that people experience after using VR headsets.

Hobbies:

I grew up skiing and snowboarding. Now I live about 10 minutes from the beach, but I hardly ever go surfing because I can’t stand the cold water. Go figure.