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.