I am currently a fourth-year Ph.D. student at the University of Oregon, studying social psychology. My advisor is Sara Hodges.
My primary interest is in decision making. Currently, this applies to studying which decisions normal people are making in their everyday lives, how they view these decisions or mentally construe them, and what these perceptions can be used for.
My secondary interest is in perspective-taking behaviors and processes. Currently I'm working on a project which addresses the perspective-taking abilities of those who willingly engage in perspective taking "practice" in their everyday lives--specifically, fiction writers (who create imaginary characters and then describe their stories) and people who play role-playing games (who create imaginary characters to behave as or control).
My tertiary interest is in human-computer interaction, specifically in the realm of computer-mediated communication and unobtrusive behavioral measures of psychological variables such as digital text and natural language interpretation on a syntactic level or behavioral logfile analyses.
I have other interests in psychometrics, statistical models, and data
representation as well.
I attended Carnegie-Mellon University for my bachelor's and master's degree, both in Logic and Computation. My MS thesis work was in unobtrusive behavioral measurement of online learners, with Richard Scheines. I spent an enjoyable year working as a research associate for Carnegie-Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, with Susan Fussell and Sara Kiesler on projects relating to shared visual spaces, anthropomorphism, differences in computer-mediated communications media, and more.