I am a 🧸 second-year Ph.D. student in the Applied Moral Psychology (AMP) Lab in the Department of Psychology at Cornell studying how we can increase moral optimism and optimize our moral behavior.

From 2022–2023, I was employed as a field experiment project manager in the 🦅 Morality Lab in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society with Dr. Liane Young and Dr. Gregg R. Sparkman at Boston College. I also served as research coordinator for the Applied Cooperation Initiative with Dr. David Rand and Dr. Erez Yoeli at the MiT Sloan School of Management. In brief, my job was to oversee behavioral studies that validate psychological interventions for good (e.g., supporting public health, increasing charitable donation, or promoting sustainable life practices) in the "real world."

Previously, I was a lab manager + research specialist in the 🐅 Princeton Social Neuroscience Lab working across the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Department of Psychology with Dr. Diana I. Tamir at Princeton. There, I mostly contributed to analyses of behavioral data evincing interventions for empathy and interpersonal social connection.

I graduated early (during the COVID-19 pandemic) in 2020 with a B.S. in psychology and minor in philosophy from Duke University where I was a research assistant in the the Mind at Large Lab with Dr. Paul Seli and postgraduate research fellow in the Imagination and Modal Cognition Lab and Moral Attitudes and Decision-Making Lab under the supervision of Dr. Felipe De Brigard, and Dr. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, respectively.

I'm fascinated by open questions in moral psychology (social norms and learning) and am interested in applying computational methods to try to answer them. I also maintain a keen interest in the experimental philosophy of religion.

For a running list of my publications, please reference my Google Scholar profile. You can find full-text .pdf files of all my peer-reviewed journal articles directly from my website repo. If you would like to read any of my work in progress, please feel free to reach out to me directly, and I'll happily provide you with a copy.

I work almost exclusively in python (e.g., pandas, scikit-learn, and huggingface) and r (tidyverse, lme4, and psych) to clean and analyze behavioral data, but I've also used javascript (i.e., jquery, react) here and there in shorter, aggressive bursts. I'm currently looking to start using d3.js more actively to visualize data for the web!

As a behavioral science researcher, I enjoy an incredibly eclectic range of day-to-day work: 🎨 experimental design, 🤖 web scraping and automation, ⌨️ NLP, 🧮 ML, 📉 statistical analysis, 📊 data visualization, and 📜 manuscript preparation, to name but a few! I've also conducted 🧠 brain scans using 🧲 fMRI and preprocessed data via 🌐 high performance computing.

Outside of work, the love of my life will always be ⚽️ soccer. I also enjoy vacillating between thought-provoking and emotionally resonant 🎬 sci-fi films and low-brow action flicks, 🏃 working out, and experimenting with 🎧 music production.

Please feel free to reach out over email:
✉ nl453 {at} cornell {dot} edu

Thanks for stopping by 👋🏼, and I hope you have a fantastic day! 😀