biography

I studied English at UC Davis for four consistent years, while waffling between several other majors: political science, linguistics, comparative literature, and Spanish, among others. Eventually, I settled into cognitive science and started working at the Dynamic Memory Lab on the relationship between biases in causal reasoning and memory. After graduating, I became the Lab Manager at Deborah Kelemen's Child Cognition Lab. At the CCL, I managed several projects on how children learn complex scientific and moral ideas, including the wonderful Evolving Minds Project -- still dear to me, as an evolutionary and cognitive anthropologist.

 

But my preternatural ability to avoid choosing one discipline -- call it curiosity -- continued apace. I took a class with Luke Glowacki on cognition-culture coevolution and discovered anthropology: the most scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the sciences. That has led me to UC Davis, where I work with Manvir Singh at the Integrative Anthropology Lab. 

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​mental occupants

It is very important to have ideas, but it is also very easy. The hard part is gathering the courage to share them with people who care enough about you to smash them and then advise you as to which bits seem like they could be pieced back together. My Research, Writing, and Blog pages reflect that process of externalizing, shattering, and recombining ideas into hardier beings. But I also care for many untested and fragile things. A few, maybe, will someday see the sun.

 

Here are some of them:

Can we imagine a universe where evolution happens without optimizing for reproductive fitness? Why are minor chords sad? How many different ways can we say "I love you"? Is secularization a myth? Why do humans build giant monuments? How does a statement become a speech act? Why do we party? What makes an activity fun? Are episodic memories experienced the same way across cultures? Is babbling a universal learning pattern? What is an aesthetic response? How can my grandma's friend -- who has severe dementia -- still successfully run therapy sessions? Are there ant mills in human behavior? How can people both hold abhorrent opinions about some people and behave compassionately toward others? Is falling in love a linear or chaotic process? Would the !Kung like Kandinsky? Why don't we have three kidneys? 

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And so forth. If you think our mental occupants would get along, please get in touch.​