About me

Academic bio (official version)

I’m a postdoctoral fellow in developmental psychology at New York University, working with Marjorie Rhodes. I received my PhD in developmental psychology in 2024 from Stanford University, where I worked with Ellen Markman on children’s reasoning about social groups and social structures, and my BA in psychology in 2018 from the University of Chicago, where I worked with Daniel Casasanto on the role of bodily experience in understanding language. As an undergraduate summer intern, I studied the development of kind representations at Harvard University with Susan Carey, and biases in causal reasoning in Frank Keil’s lab at Yale University.

Academic bio (unofficial version)

I grew up in New York with scientist parents. Although they worked in cell biology, I found myself gravitating towards humanities and social sciences. I was lucky to attend a high school where I learned about psychology and philosophy through classes and through quizbowl. I loved the big weighty questions philosophers asked, but I was more hungry for answers than philosophy seemed to provide.

I went off to Chicago for college, because I wanted to explore a different city and meet new people. At UChicago, I dabbled in a bunch of fields before I realized that psychologists also considered big weighty questions and could even reach empirical answers, so I became a psychology major. I applied to many psychology labs at UChicago to learn about research, and the only one who took a chance on me was Daniel Casasanto. In his lab, I reflected on my experience switching and traveling between two languages (English/Mandarin) and cultures (New York/Beijing), and got excited about how language shapes our experience of the world.

I applied to summer research internships my first two summers for a change of scenery and ways of thinking. In Frank Keil’s lab at Yale, I worked with a fantastic mentor who loved philosophy and movies, learned about developmental psychology for the first time, and got so bored in New Haven I went home to New York every weekend. I was curious to learn more about developmental psychology (the origins of all my questions in childhood) so I went to Susan Carey’s lab at Harvard, where I got to hang out with a whole lab of people at intersection of philosophy and psychology, and became interested in how language shapes the development of category representations in childhood. Soon after my return to UChicago, I was adopted into Susan Goldin-Meadow’s lab and I dropped my second major in philosophy to a minor (I couldn’t resist taking another cool psychology elective instead of Elementary Logic).

In the course of undergrad, I was very lucky to: figure out that I liked research, define a narrowly focused topic that I wanted to research for several years (how language shapes the way children form categories), and accumulate enough research experience in undergrad to plausibly qualify me to do it. As a result, I applied to PhD programs in psychology and cognitive science my senior year. I would not recommend applying to PhD programs unless you are sure of all of these factors (see resources), and am happy to share my experience and advice on this decision.

For PhD programs, I was torn between staying close-by in Chicago or starting a new adventure in California. I loved the community of people at Stanford, but my partner’s then-job tied him to Chicago. After some indecision, I went off to Stanford start my PhD and a long-distance relationship.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit in the middle of my second year of graduate school. Although remote work allowed my partner and I to reunite, it was a time of anxiety and fear about our own health and well-being, that of our friends and families, about broader inequalities in society, and about the state of the planet. My research felt like the least significant thing in the world. After reemerging from those bleak days, I committed to studying children’s reasoning about social categories and social disparities, culminating in my dissertation on the social significance of children attributing social disparities to social structures rather than to inherent features of social groups.

I’ve now returned to my roots in NYC as a postdoc at NYU, where I’m continuing my work on children’s reasoning about social groups, funded by a fellowship from the National Science Foundation. I’m more than happy to chat with anyone about applying to NSF postdoc fellowships and my general experience with the postdoc search process. My partner and I live in Greenwich Village, and spend our time exploring the city, playing board games with friends, and doing our best to get outdoors.

Outside academia

I’m a second-generation Asian American woman.

I’m most at home in the vibrancy and energy of big cities. I love to explore museum exhibits, attend plays, and watch independent movies. However, my time in the Bay Area during the COVID-19 pandemic also (re)ignited some outdoorsy hobbies, such as hiking, backpacking, climbing, and caving. I’ve also been involved in the quizbowl community for more than a decade, where I have been particularly passionate about diversity and inclusivity.

I speak English (my native language) and Mandarin (my heritage language).