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, studying how these skills develop in children, how these skills may have evolved in primates and domesticated animals, and how we could imbue machines with these skills. My approach to 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 children learn social routine words surprisingly early and how do conversational norms (like conditional relevance) scaffold word learning (CogSci 2025 paper)
- how does children’s play start and end? (Phil. Trans. B paper)
- how social norms influence spatial navigation? (in prep.)
- how does macaque monkey social rank influence social proximity? (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.