Modern life is organized by our impressions of other people: who we trust, hire, charge, credit, and follow. These impressions are the lifeblood of decision-making, yet they often influence our actions in ways we do not intend, realize, or want, entangling us in a web of misjudgments and overgeneralizations. As a research scientist, I investigate how we form and use social impressions to navigate the world. My work draws on perspectives and methods from neuroeconomics, vision science, cognition, social psychology, and judgment & decision-making research to model the mechanisms of impression-mediated decision-making. To this end, I use a diverse toolkit of behavioral paradigms, data sources, and computational methods (e.g., natural language processing, machine learning). 

The throughline of my work is that impressions are not static—neither in the information we use to form them nor in the meaning that information carries when it captures our attention; but rather flexible, context-sensitive, and shaped heavily by both real-time and longer-term experience. This perspective advances our understanding of why bias persists, when behavioral interventions succeed or fail, and how impressions recalibrate with new experiences so the same social signals mean something different to us over time.