I am a graduate student in the Cognitive and Neural Systems doctoral program.  I received my undergraduate degree in Psychology and Philosophy at Augustana College, where I became fascinated with topics in philosophy of mind and the relationship between brain and behavior.  Before entering graduate school, I worked in the University of Iowa Cognitive Brain Development lab where I managed several studies that used a combination of behavioral measures and neuroimaging techniques to examine brain development in typical and clinical populations, in relation to substance use, personality, risky decision making, and reward processing.

As a graduate student, my interests have evolved into understanding the processes that influence our decision making.  Because several aspects of decision making requires one to extract information from the environment, my approach is to understand differences in how we perceive and attend to our environment and in turn, use that information to make predictions and judgments which may ultimately guide our decisions.  How do we select which information to attend to? To what extent does our ability to retrieve and encode information (memory) inform our judgments and how? What impact do individual differences in attention, perception, learning, and memory have on our decision making capabilities?

By taking into account how individuals differ in variables that predict information use, my goal is to bridge the gap between research and application by gaining a deeper understanding of how we make sense and make use of the massive amount of information around us.