Position Title
Assistant Professor
Starting July 2025
Before becoming an assistant professor at UC Davis, I was a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind in London and San Francisco. My work combines methods from artificial intelligence (e.g., reinforcement learning, neural networks) with those from cognitive psychology (e.g., study of unobserved "cognitive" processes, targeted task design) and neuroscience (e.g., moment-to-moment "neural" recordings). I am particularly interested in how we - and how artificial systems - learn and make decisions, and how we represent memories and knowledge, structuring our thought and reasoning processes. I obtained my PhD in cognitive psychology from UC Berkeley, working with Anne Collins and Silvia Bunge. The work in my lab will focus on Reinforcement Learning in humans and artificial agents, on neural network modeling, and on collecting and analyzing increasingly large and naturalistic data. Questions will involve the (hierarchical) structure of mental representations and the neural and cognitive mechanisms that underlie learning and memory.