Every time we talk to someone, we’re tasked with reasoning about their mind. Often our key insights come not from what they say, but how they say it. Imagine asking a friend what they think of your new haircut. Sure, their words will matter. But you might learn more about what they really think from the pause before they speak, their puzzled facial expression, or the way they say, “it’s… different.”

In my research, I study how subtle conversational cues — like disfluencies, delays, and surprise — reveal mental processes behind what people say, leading people to draw rich inferences about what others’ know, like, and believe. These inferences help us navigate communication, evaluate others, and learn from social interaction.

Much of my work focuses on the development of such inferences in early childhood, and how they guide social learning. I also examine how adults use these signals to reason about others in real time. Methodologically, I integrate behavioral experiments, corpus analysis, and computational modeling to study these inference processes.

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University, working with Julian Jara-Ettinger at the Computational Social Cognition Lab. I completed my PhD working with Alex Shaw at the DIBS Lab at UChicago and Dan Yurovsky at the Communication and Learning Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.

Prior training:
PhD in Developmental Psychology, University of Chicago
MPhil in Social and Developmental Psychology, University of Cambridge
BA in Psychology, Reed College