I’m a PhD candidate at UCSD in the Comparative Cognition Lab studying the cognitive science of interaction, asking questions about how we act, think, and connect with others. I take comparative and computational approaches to investigate the development and evolution of these behaviors skills and how we might imbue machines with these skills (but maybe we shouldn’t). My approach prioritizes naturalistic observational methods and I build tools to better analyze the dynamic, rapid, and multimodal forms of interaction and cognition as they occur in the wild.
research projects
- how do children learn words like yes, no, okay so surprisingly early? How might the communicative demands of conversational turn-taking scaffold word learning (CogSci 2025 paper)?
- How does play start and end? (Phil. Trans. B paper)
- How do proxemics (spatial norms) influence pedestrian traffic? (CogSci 2026 | arxiv | project site | open pedestrian dataset)
- How does social rank influence macaque navigational paths? (CogSci 2025 paper)[video, project site]
- How do well do LLMs collaborate in realtime with people and where to they fall short?
- [mumo] — a free and open source research tool for analyzing multimodal interaction
Previously I studied Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Dartmouth College, built natural language understanding systems at Forge.AI, researched pedestrian-driver interactions at MIT to inform autonomous vehicle design, and a was a product manager at VideoAmp.