Portland, OR
Email
Github
Google Scholar
LinkedIn
ORCID
OSF
ResearchGate
I am actively seeking new employment opportunities.
About Me
I am a cognitive psychologist with 10+ years of research experience. I have a passion for psychology, design, data, statistics, and programming.
My research background involves a breadth of experience at the cognitive and behavioral levels of analysis. A core focus has been understanding how people process information. I have extensively studied factors that moderate learning and the quality of human decision-making (e.g., prior experiences, personal beliefs, motivation, expertise, ambiguity/complexity of information, & information search strategies). Additionally, I've studied how states of consciousness (e.g., fatigue, circadian rhythms) affect information processing.
My training has taught me to ask good questions and to answer those questions using an appropriate methodological and technological approach. I have strong compentencies in research methodology, survey development, data processing, statistical analysis (R, Python, SPSS, Excel), programming (Python, JavaScript, HTML+CSS), and visual design. I am comfortable with both quantitative and qualitative analytical methods. I have also honed my science communication and story-telling abilities through academic teaching, research presentations, and mentorship.
I live in Portland, Oregon with my wife and two dogs.
Research History
One area of my research is how prior experiences, beliefs, and motivation affect learning, reasoning, and decision-making. My master's thesis at San José State University examined individual's ability to critically assess arguments with equivalent logical fallacies that either supported or opposed human-caused climate change. This project was published in Thinking & Reasoning. My master's thesis at the University of Pittsburgh examined how personal motivations affect our ability to learn cause-effect relationships in dynamic environments. This project was published in Cognitive Science.
Additionally, I have studied the development and maintenance of expertise, which was the topic of my comprehensive examination in my PhD program. This project involved conducting a literature review to examine the psychological factors that affect expertise in practicing physicians. This project, that was co-lead with several other scientists, led to 5 published manuscripts and the creation of a special issue on the cognitive science of medical expertise.
Prior to my doctoral work, I was a research associate within NASA's Human Systems Integretion Division, studying topics related to human performance. I examined questions like what factors reduce human performance and how to create environments and situations conducive to peak performance. One of the bigger projects I worked on within the Fatigue Countermeasures Laboratory involved producing recommendations for the sleep environments in future long-duration space missions.
My dissertation was awarded a competive grant (Mellon Fellowship) to examine the psychology of collective decision-making and voting. In this project I designed four studies to examine people's preferences, understanding, and metacognition for different voting systems. This involved creating a novel framework that accomplished four interrelated goals: 1) introduce different voting systems to people in an understandable way, 2) measure people's preferences for voting systems in different ways of measuring preferences--one from intuitive choices in a behavioral task and the other from stated preferences after learning the names of different voting systems, 3) assess people's understanding of different voting systems, 4) be used to implement evidence-based teaching interventions.
Personal Hobbies & Interests
In my free hours I enjoy spending time with a number of hobbies and interests including: music (listening, playing, concerts, audio gear), hockey, hiking, programming, statistics, and design-related side-projects, baking, food fermentation, watching interviews & lectures, deep diving into seemingly random topics, and picking up new hobbies (my latest one is rock climbing).
About Me
I am a cognitive psychologist with 10+ years of research experience. I have a passion for psychology, design, data, statistics, and programming.
My research background involves a breadth of experience at the cognitive and behavioral levels of analysis. A core focus has been understanding how people process information. I have extensively studied factors that moderate learning and the quality of human decision-making (e.g., prior experiences, personal beliefs, motivation, expertise, ambiguity/complexity of information, & information search strategies). Additionally, I've studied how states of consciousness (e.g., fatigue, circadian rhythms) affect information processing.
My training has taught me to ask good questions and to answer those questions using an appropriate methodological and technological approach. I have strong compentencies in research methodology, survey development, data processing, statistical analysis (R, Python, SPSS, Excel), programming (Python, JavaScript, HTML+CSS), and visual design. I am comfortable with both quantitative and qualitative analytical methods. I have also honed my science communication and story-telling abilities through academic teaching, research presentations, and mentorship.
I live in Portland, Oregon with my wife and two dogs.
Research History
One area of my research is how prior experiences, beliefs, and motivation affect learning, reasoning, and decision-making. My master's thesis at San José State University examined individual's ability to critically assess arguments with equivalent logical fallacies that either supported or opposed human-caused climate change. This project was published in Thinking & Reasoning. My master's thesis at the University of Pittsburgh examined how personal motivations affect our ability to learn cause-effect relationships in dynamic environments. This project was published in Cognitive Science.
Additionally, I have studied the development and maintenance of expertise, which was the topic of my comprehensive examination in my PhD program. This project involved conducting a literature review to examine the psychological factors that affect expertise in practicing physicians. This project, that was co-lead with several other scientists, led to 5 published manuscripts and the creation of a special issue on the cognitive science of medical expertise.
Prior to my doctoral work, I was a research associate within NASA's Human Systems Integretion Division, studying topics related to human performance. I examined questions like what factors reduce human performance and how to create environments and situations conducive to peak performance. One of the bigger projects I worked on within the Fatigue Countermeasures Laboratory involved producing recommendations for the sleep environments in future long-duration space missions.
My dissertation was awarded a competive grant (Mellon Fellowship) to examine the psychology of collective decision-making and voting. In this project I designed four studies to examine people's preferences, understanding, and metacognition for different voting systems. This involved creating a novel framework that accomplished four interrelated goals: 1) introduce different voting systems to people in an understandable way, 2) measure people's preferences for voting systems in different ways of measuring preferences--one from intuitive choices in a behavioral task and the other from stated preferences after learning the names of different voting systems, 3) assess people's understanding of different voting systems, 4) be used to implement evidence-based teaching interventions.
Personal Hobbies & Interests
In my free hours I enjoy spending time with a number of hobbies and interests including: music (listening, playing, concerts, audio gear), hockey, hiking, programming, statistics, and design-related side-projects, baking, food fermentation, watching interviews & lectures, deep diving into seemingly random topics, and picking up new hobbies (my latest one is rock climbing).