Hello!

I’m a developmental cognitive scientist interested in how we learn social categories, like gender and race, and especially how language and social structures shape that process. I use a combination of developmental, cognitive, and computational methods to study how representations of social categories emerge in childhood, how such representations are transmitted from person to person, and what cognitive mechanisms explain such processes.

I’m currently a postdoctoral fellow at New York University, working with Marjorie Rhodes and Mark Ho. I had - until recently - been funded by the National Science Foundation. I received my PhD in developmental psychology from Stanford University in 2024, working with Ellen Markman.

I’m interested in how we develop social categories that carve the diversity of human life into groups. Why do we think some people look different, behave differently, or end up on different paths from others? How do these beliefs emerge in childhood? And as children grow up, how do those ways of thinking contribute to maintaining differences or disparities in the first place?

In particular, I’m interested in how language shapes children’s thinking about such matters. How might the way we talk sustain, recreate, or alter the social differences and disparities we describe?

I’m also interested in how we think about the role of social structures, since many of social differences and disparities are structural in nature. Although thinking about social structures can be challenging for children, and even adults, children are capable of such structural thinking at a young age. How can we harness children’s capacity for structural thinking to combat stereotypes and other reductionist ways of thinking about social groups?

Other random interests of mine include social ontology, pragmatics, and speech acts. Although psychology and cognitive science is my home turf, I love learning about perspectives on these topics from philosophy, linguistics, sociology, and beyond.