I recently completed a Ph.D. in Psychology and Cognitive Science at Tufts University, in the Emotion, Brain, and Behavior Lab. I studied emotion – how emotions occur in the mind and body, how people regulate their emotions, and the impacts of affective processes on individual and collective problems.

I think open science practices and transparency are important.

I have transferable skills in mentorship, training, and leading small teams, programming, managing, and analyzing data (preference for R and Python), and communicating scientific information.

I have experience teaching as a lab instructor, with a focus on research methods and statistics.

Research

I study affective information processing, with a focus on mindfulness and emotion regulation. I am interested in psychophysiological processes, subjective experience, and behavior. I aim to build knowledge that will help to address collective problems, optimize performance, and improve health. One way to visualize my psychological framework is:

three-way venn diagram with affect, behavior, and cognition; all inside social and cultural context

My main line of research explores how people experience and regulate emotions when faced with climate change information, and how those emotion processes are associated with climate change solutions. I developed a (conceptual framework) and conducted three empirical studies in this area as a graduate student at Tufts. (dissertation link)

conceptual framework of emotion regulation applied to the climate change situation

In the above Figure, the solid lines correspond to proposed paths in the conceptual framework. Climate emotions are initiated by exposure to climate change information (which can be external or internal).

I also studied spatial perforamce (route planning) under time pressure (route planning project link). This research on emotion regulation and performance in stressful situations was part of a collaboration with the Center for Applied Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Among other findings, we noted a particularly strong effect of urgency messaging, independent of other temporal parameters.

subjetive time pressure reported based on within- and between-persons time pressure manipulations

The leftmost plotted condition was hypothesized to have the lowest time pressure and the rightmost, the highest. The panels indicate the total time condition, the x-axis the waiting time condition, and the paired plots indicate the urgency condition (red = urgent). In each condition, horizontal lines indicate quartiles. Each dot is the mean for that condition. The overlayed horizontal line is the grand mean across all conditions.

A third area of interest is behavioral health. I worked on behavioral health research at the Richmond Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Virginia Commonwealth University, including the Institute for Drug and Alcohol Studies, Clark-Hill Institute for Positive Youth Development, and the (now-defunct) Commonwealth Institute on Child and Family Studies.

I completed a M.A. in Psychological Sciences at Northern Arizona University, where I studied Satipaṭṭhāna-style mindfulness meditation training from a psychophysiological perspective. I completed a B.S. in Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University and worked on studies of dispositional mindfulness and mindfulness interventions.