I am a graduate student in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, working primarily with Dr. Susan Carey and Dr. Elizabeth Spelke in the Laboratory for Developmental Studies. My research explores the intersection of social cognition with music cognition, movement and action.

I aim to shed light on novel elements of social cognition by leveraging the phenomena of music and dance; for example, I am working to expand our understanding of goal inference to explain how we reason about actions like dance, ritual and exercise. I also aim to understand how our perception of music and dance depends on social cognitive representations, even early in development.

In addition, I am interested in the developmental and evolutionary origins of the human music capacity, particularly the origins and social consequences of our ability to entrain, or move in synchrony with an auditory beat.

I use a range of methods and populations, including experimental methods from both cognitive and social psychology to study adults; developmental methods, such as looking-time measures, to study human cognition prior to extensive experience; and cross-species comparative methods to get at evolutionary questions.