Hi, welcome! I am neuroscientist in the the Pediatric Neuroimaging Lab directed by Dr. Sarah Shultz at the Marcus Autism Center in Atlanta, Georgia. I spent my early childhood in Alaska, then moved to Connecticut, where I also completed my undergraduate degree (go Huskies!), and now, continually adding to my cross-country trek, I’ve made my way to Atlanta.

As a developmental social neuroscientist, I investigate the mechanisms by which modifiable factors enmeshed within early social experiences contribute to individual variability in neurobehavioral development. Infants and their caregivers form a mutually-adaptive unit that becomes the foundation of early development and learning. Characterizing how neurobehavioral differences emerge relative to distributions of the modifiable factors that affect this unit, from the level of individuals, i.e. infant attention, caregiver responsiveness, to policies, i.e. maternal leave, financial stability, and how those factors interact with non-modifiable factors like genetic likelihood for neurodevelopmental conditions and gestational maturity, underpins translational efforts to understand how neurodevelopmental variability emerges within the first postnatal months. My work pairs novel computational methods with longitudinal curve-fitting analyses to map these dynamic processes in social neurodevelopment.