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 5th year PhD candidate in the Psychological & Brain Sciences department at Dartmouth College, working in
the
Computational Social Affective Neuroscience (COSAN) Lab
and affiliated with the
Social Interaction Lab (SoIL). I work with
Luke J. Chang,
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.