I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where I have ties to both the cognitive and developmental areas. I direct the Perception, Cognition, & Development Laboratory (PCDL), which is devoted, broadly, to understanding how the mind works and develops.

I began my career at Emory University, where I received a degree in Psychology (and almost a business degree, but I dropped that plan a few credits short of the requirements, to instead focus on my research efforts). There, I was involved in teaching and tutoring for Introductory Statistics and also volunteered for the Emory Helpline, an organization which seeks to provide support to struggling members of the community. However, I was most involved in research. Under the guidance of Stella Lourenco, I was a research assistant and lab manager in what was formerly (and fittingly!) called the Spatial Cognition Lab.

After graduating from Emory, I went on to pursue my interests in cognitive psychology at Yale University. I worked primarily with Frank Keil and Dick Aslin, but also extensively with Josh Knobe and Sam McDougle. After defending my dissertation in March of 2022, I became a MindCORE Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where I once again had the opportunity to work with a phenomenal cast of folks, primarily Liz Brannon, Anna Papafragou, and Russell Epstein. I spent two years in that position before opening up the PCDL.

Since the beginning of my career, my primary interest has been space — how it is that we perceive, represent, and interact with the world around us. But what I really care about is… everything! I’ve always thought that space is an especially apt case study for understanding how the mind works in general (because spatial cognition is important to all visual and mobile organisms, because much is known about the neural bases of spatial representation, because space is thought to play a vital role in other domains, like social or numerical cognition). But, of course, there are so many ways to explore how the mind works; I have not yet discovered the limits of my own curiosity.

For this reason, the PCDL aims to study human cognition through a broad lens. We view each of our projects as case studies of larger questions in psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science. To learn more about our work, see our current projects and list of publications.