Brief overview and background

I’m a scientist working in the areas of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. I am a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin. I am part of the Whole Communities Whole Health Research Initiative, a UT Grand Challenge. 

 

I did my PhD at the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara where I worked with Jonathan Schooler. During this time I was also a visiting research scientist at the Neuroanatomy and Connectivity Research Group at the Max Plank Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. I completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Sleep and Consciousness at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I worked with Giulio Tononi. 

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Research interests

My research uses a diversity of methods, including behavioral testing, computational modeling, functional and structural MRI, EEG, sleep physiology, non-invasive brain stimulation and eye tracking to address fundamental questions in human psychology. 

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My long-term research interests extend to broad scientific questions, including: sleep, perception, consciousness, attention, public health, wellbeing, and the upper potentials of the human mind. I am also interested in specific questions in human cognition, including how the capacity for explicit self-awareness arises in the human brain, the significance of symbolic representation in defining human cognition, as well as fundamental issues pertaining to emergence, information, and semiotic processes in biological systems.

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CV, Bibliometrics

My work has led to numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals and talks at international conferences (please see Google Scholar page). 

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