I am a Ph.D. student in Cognitive Psychology with the Department of Psychology and Human Development, Peabody College, Vanderbilt University. I hold an M.S. in Computer Science, an M.S in Psychology, and my B.S. was a dual degree in Computer Science and European Economics.

My research is concerned with the visual and spatial organization of human conceptual knowledge. For example, Laura Novick (Vanderbilt) and I have published research on the ways in which people learn from and use diagrams to assemble objects, and our work has revealed particular visual-spatial properties of diagrams that are important for successful inference-making. Daniel Schwartz (Stanford) and I have conducted research revealing the importance of visual and spatial contrasts as a way of supporting conceptual differentiation, a useful pre-cursor to teaching more complex concepts. John Rieser (Vanderbilt) and I have investigated ways of improving the perception of self-motion in virtual reality environments, a technology promising for supporting and improving the ways in which people externally represent concepts and then reason with them. Finally, my own research with Jim Pellegrino (UIC) and Jeff Nyquist (Vanderbilt) is presently looking at the ways in which people use the visual and spatial features of diagrams to extract the macrostructure of a text, even before they read it, as a way of facilitating comprehension and reasoning. Eventually, I intend to develop psychological and computational models of human conception and reasoning based on visuospatial representation and processing to compliment the more prominent verbal, featural, and propositional models.