about

I’ve spent more than a decade working in and around questions about the brain and human behavior, but I came to cognitive neuroscience through clinical work. Early in my training, I worked with people with acquired and developmental brain injuries and became frustrated by the distance between the cognitive functions we cared about and what we could actually observe. I wanted to know what was happening underneath. That led me to EEG, eye tracking, and a lasting interest in using psychophysiological measures to better understand cognition and ultimately improve the standard of care.

Since then, I’ve worked across cognitive neuroscience, human factors, healthcare, and clinical research. I’m a mixed-methods researcher by training, and I’m particularly interested in attention and perception: how the information around us shapes what we notice, understand, and ultimately do, often before we’re consciously aware of it.

I also like working across disciplines. Scientists, clinicians, engineers, patients, and business teams can look at the same problem and see very different things. Some of my favorite work has involved getting those perspectives into the same room, finding the question underneath them, and figuring out what evidence would actually help.

That has increasingly drawn me toward applied science and decision-making. I’ve worked in human factors research and consulting, medical-device usability, and, most recently, spent the last year leading clinical research in biotech. Across those settings, I’ve found that I’m as interested in deciding which questions are worth asking, what evidence we need, and what to do with an imperfect answer as I am in producing the evidence itself.

The problems I care about are relevant well beyond the laboratory: how we distinguish signal from noise, how attention and prior experience shape what information gets through, and how people and organizations make good decisions under uncertainty. In healthcare, I’m especially interested in bringing richer measures of cognitive function closer to patients and clinicians.

I’m also an artist and printmaker, which is probably not entirely unrelated to spending so much of my life thinking about vision, perception, and what people notice.

background

I grew up surfing, drawing, and singing in the car along coast highway in California.

I’m originally from California and maintain a broad professional network across the San Francisco Bay Area and Salt Lake City. Before moving to British Columbia, I lived and worked in California and Utah in clinical and research settings spanning communication disorders, brain injury, neurodegenerative disease, and assistive technology.

I now live in British Columbia. Most recently, I spent the last year leading clinical research across neuropsychiatry, women’s health, brain health, and emerging therapeutics. I continue to be especially drawn to work that brings together people from different disciplines and ways of thinking.

When I’m not working or traveling, I’m usually running steep forest trails with my dog or trying to trust my feet on granite crystals.