Hello! I am a 4th-year PhD student in Developmental Science at the Institute of Child Development working primarily with Dr. Daniel Berry in the Bio-Ecology, Self-Regulation, and Learning (BSL) Lab and Dr. Jed Elison in the Elison Lab for Developmental Brain and Behavior Research.

Broadly speaking, I study the early development of brain, physiological, and behavioral systems that support social interaction in the first years of life. Humans are an exceptionally social species and I am interested in how infants and young children develop the abilities to successfully engage with one another, often times with very little formal instruction.

To answer questions about early social development, I study typically developing infants as well as those at heightened risk for developing Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by virtue of having an older sibling with ASD. My research is translational as it has roots in basic science but with implications for clinical and intervention science.

Many meta-theoretical and theoretical frameworks guide my work. My work takes a developmental psychopathology perspective that suggests that we can learn a lot from the joint study of typical and atypical development as well as processes of risk and adaptation. I also draw heavily on dynamic systems ideas that focus on the many inter-dependent systems of an organism and the multiple contexts in which they are embedded.

Some questions that guide my work are as follows.

• How do infants come to learn about the minds of others?
• How do coordinated brain, physiological, and behavioral systems organize and operate during real-time social exchange early in development?
• How does the “second-person” social experience function in development and inform clinical science?
• What markers and processes reflect early deviations from typical trajectories of social development?
• How do processes of risk and adaptation operate together in early development to produce individual differences in social abilities?

The ability to ask research questions hinges on the use of appropriate measurement and analytic techniques. My work also involves careful consideration and development of statistical methods to help answer my research questions. I study multiple levels of analysis, spanning brain, autonomic nervous system, behavior, and context and often draw on methods from many different disciplines. I am particularly interested in causally informed techniques, measurement invariance, and non-linear dynamic methods.