About Me
Wasita Mahaphanit
PhD candidate @ Dartmouth College
I study how we make sense of other people's minds and their shared experiences.
I am currently a final-year PhD candidate (expected graduation: May 2026) in the
Psychological & Brain Sciences department
at Dartmouth College, working in the
Computational Social Affective Neuroscience (COSAN) Lab, where I work with
Luke J. Chang
and collaborate with
Robert Hawkins
and
Jonathan Phillips. See my research interests page for more details.
Prior to graduate school, I worked as the lab manager of
Michael J. Frank's
Lab of Neural Computation + Cognition. My research focused on understanding how humans learn and make
decisions under uncertainty, particularly within the context of
psychiatric disorders and with a specific emphasis on obsessive
compulsive disorder (OCD).
Before that, I also worked as an undergraduate research assistant in
Amitai Shenhav's Lab, where
I studied performance monitoring and cognitive control within the
context of task-switching.
I was born in Thailand, grew up in Maine, and then lived in Rhode
Island for several years for college and work.
Outside of research, I enjoy ruminating while showering, cuddling with
my kitty Joji (pictured above), and playing video games (currently
Baldur's Gate 3
and
Elden Ring).
In a past life, I practiced
aerial hoop/lyra.
Nowadays, I attend UVCC workshops when
I can.