Hello!

I’m a developmental cognitive scientist studying how we learn social categories, from relatively minimal ones like pedestrians and drivers to rich and contentious ones like gender or racial categories. These categories help people navigate social life, by carving the complexity of humanity into neat (sometimes, too neat) categories, allowing people to notice and explain social regularities, to predict the behavior of others, and to communicate about the social world.

I’m currently a postdoctoral researcher at New York University, working with Marjorie Rhodes and Mark Ho. I received my PhD in developmental psychology from Stanford University in 2024, working with Ellen Markman.

My research uses 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.

In one line of work, I look at how children represent social structures, since many of social differences and disparities are structural in nature. Why is structural thinking so challenging? And even though it is challenging, children are capable of such structural thinking at a young age. How can we harness children’s capacity for structural thinking to combat reductionist ways of thinking about social groups?

In another line of work, I study how language shapes children’s thinking about such matters. How do stereotypes get transmitted through language, despite speakers’ best intentions? How might the way we talk sustain, recreate, or alter the social differences and disparities we describe?