research interests.

Sometimes you meet someone and click within minutes. Other times you talk for an hour and leave feeling lonelier than when you arrived. My research asks why. Conversation only ever gives us glimpses of another person's mind — a stated opinion, a well-timed reaction, a story they choose to tell — yet from those glimpses we decide whether someone truly gets us.

My dissertation showed that connection comes not from how much two people have in common, but from what a commonality reveals about who the other person is. I test these ideas by embedding experiments inside real conversations: multiplayer web paradigms where strangers chat, co-watch, and disclose in real time, paired with computational modeling and NLP.

As a postdoc, I'm extending this work to how people build and update models of other minds during joint action and planning — and how breakdowns in that process may underlie social difficulties in psychiatric conditions.