Affective Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

Lab Manager

I graduated from UC Berkeley in 2008 with bachelors in Cognitive Science and Economics. In Cognitive Science, my undergraduate research was on synesthesia with PhD candidate Bryan Alvarez, and, for my thesis, on three-dimensional visual synthesis under the mentorship of Lynn Robertson. In Economics, my interests are behavioral economics, game theory, international economics, and--for fun--philosophical political economy. I worked with then-PhD candiate Andrew Hayashi exploring the interactions of endownment effects on social preferences, with Professor Stefano DellaVigna in a number of applied behavioral microeconomics projects, and Professor Botond Koszegi my advisor for my thesis on the effects of uncertainty on social preferences.

Currently, my research combines behavioral and fMRI methods to investigate perceptual biases in emotional processing. I use carry-over designs and multi-variate pattern analysis approaches to explore the neural correlates of these biases. I've also been involved in a number of other projects at the lab on fear conditioning, neurofeedback and linguistic ambiguity. More broadly, I'm interested in fMRI statistical modeling, in particular, in using more robust methods of regression analysis such as those that incorporate heteroskedasticity and variance clustering. I'm also interested in finding similarity metrics of fMRI data which retain spatial structure; quality diagnostics of fMRI data; and reproducibility of experimental results with documented data and analysis scripts. I am starting my Ph.D. at Helen Willis Neuroscience Institute at Berkeley in Fall 2011.

Finally, I dislike Matlab(R) and Apple Inc. products. I like good wine and travel.