Hello! I am currently a postdoc in Molly Crockett's lab at Princeton with Molly Crockett. I completed my PhD at Johns Hopkins University, advised by Marina Bedny.

​

Humans can think incredibly rich and complex thoughts that go beyond information contained in first-person experience. We can think thoughts about experiences we've never had or flexibly re-interpret and re-structure an experience from our past. I'm interested in the productivity of thought in this (rather unconventional) sense. How do we have thoughts that aren't mere reflections of regularities we directly experienced from the outside world? What kinds of structures can our minds impose on the world? 

 

One answer is that humans share information with each other using language. This allows collective, cultural understandings of a range of experiences no one person could have gained alone. I'm therefore interested in how people communicate and learn about each other through linguistic testimony. My PhD dissertation, for example, examined what people born blind come to understand about things they've never seen, like color.  

​

But a more fundamental question I'm interested in is, what is the architecture of thought? Understanding how thoughts are structured is key to understanding how we can think beyond experiential inputs. All of my projects aim to uncover structures that are used to make sense of our own and others' experiences.

 

In the past few years, I've been particularly interested in the idea of narrative as a unique form of structure in thought and language. Using a combination of approaches from philosophy, linguistics, and computational modeling, we are investigating narratives people tell about their own and others' moral actions. The ultimate goal of this project is to examine how narratives we tell ourselves (i.e., a particular, subjective structuring of experience) shapes how we understand ourselves. 

​

​