I’m growing a lab!

Coming this fall…the Sciminds Research Studio

I’m excited to preview that the new lab Sciminds, short for the Social Computations and Interacting Minds Research Studiowill be launching this Fall!

Look out for a new website with team-member bios and more details about opportunities to get involved!

Last Updated: 07/30/25

As of January 2025 I’ve officially started as a new Assistant Professor in UC San Diego’s awesome Department of Psychology. I’m currently growing a research group with the current broad aims of understanding how we learn about, represent, remember, and share information about other people by observing or participating in different kinds of social interactions. Until we’re up and running I’ll continue to post updates here.

I love taking an interdisciplinary approach to asking these questions drawing inspiration from: cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, behavioral economics, affective computing, and machine-learning & AI. In particular, I’m a big believer in the mutually-beneficial relationship between scientific inquiry and methodological development. New tools are just as exciting as new findings because they offer us new perspectives on how to explore our psychological questions.

So far this has included stuff like: (a) using online games to study how gossip helps us learn from and connect with others¹ ; (b) scanning brains while people watch TV shows to model neural & affective state dynamics using hidden-markov-models and collaborative filtering (hello Netflix recommender system!); (c) using natural-language-processing to study how social relationships organize our memories; (d) using psychological-utility models to understand how social emotions like guilt and indebtedness drive our decision-making; and (e) building open-source tools for making facial expression analysis via deep-nets accessible to all social scientists; making fMRI analysis more intuitive; and bringing multi-level models to Python.

If any of this sounds interesting to you and if any of the positions below sound like a good fit, feel free to reach out!

Opportunities to join the lab

PhD students

I’m not actively recruiting for the 2026 PhD cycle, but will be reviewing applications. Please checkout UCSD Psychology’s prospective student page for more details.

This is a great opportunity for anyone who thinks the research directions above sound interesting or has some related ideas they want to explore together. Pursuing a PhD is a big journey that can often looks pretty different from what you might expect. At the same time, the most rewarding parts of that journey differ from person-to-person and even from past-you to future-you! You don’t need to have things figured out at this stage, but you do have to bring an uncompromising willingness to fail, learn, and grow.

Post-doctoral researchers

Feel free to reach out if you think it would be fun to work together! While the lab doesn’t currently have funding for a full-time position, this could be a great opportunity to explore new research directions and funding avenues and learn/develop new methods together. It’s also a good opportunity for someone who’s still undecided about their long-term career goals and is considering academia, industry or other paths.

1. If podcasts are more your thing, I had the awesome opportunity to be on Normal Gossip and talk about my work a bit! ↩