BACKGROUND

I'm an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Algoma University in Brampton, ON. I earned my Ph.D. and M.A. in Psychology at the University of Toronto, and my B.A. at the University of Chicago.

My research focuses on effort. I'm especially interested in understanding how and when children persist through difficulty to discover new ideas and solutions, as well as how they learn to exert invisible, social forms of effort to share their ideas and collaborate with others. A central theme in my lab's research is that children's decisions, motivations, and perceptions are shaped by their social contexts. In this research, I use a variety of methods to capture children's implicit and explicit reasoning from infancy to early adolescence, including behavioural coding, eye gaze experiments, semi-naturalistic studies, and integration of machine learning technology (e.g., DeepLabCut).

I am committed to teaching and undergraduate experience. These values led me to co-found the Psychology Undergraduate Research Club at the University of Toronto, and continue to guide my teaching and mentorship at Algoma University. I'm also involved in initiatives aimed at improving the representativeness of psychological science, especially with the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD). If you are interested in strengthening your peer review practices as an author, reviewer, or editor, you can access free training courses through SRCD.