I’m an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Tulane University, using cognitive neuroscience methods to study human social understanding. I received my PhD in Neuroscience from MIT, working with Rebecca Saxe and Nancy Kanwisher, and conducted postdoctoral research with Winrich Freiwald at The Rockefeller University.
The Social Memory Lab is recruiting! Please reach out if you’re interested in joining the lab.
My research addresses the question of how we understand other people. As we interact with others, we readily interpret their actions and speech by positing unobservable causes, such as their intentions and beliefs about the world. How does our brain accomplish these impressive causal inferences? I ask this question using methods from cognitive neuroscience, including neuroimaging (fMRI), intracranial electrical recordings (iEEG), and behavior.
I’m also interested in how neural systems supporting social understanding develop during infancy and childhood. I’ve pioneered novel techniques to scan awake infants using fMRI, and found that parts of visual cortex that preferentially respond to faces exist as early as 4 months of age.
My work has been featured by the MIT Press, the Atlantic, Le Monde, and others.