I grew up in Kentucky and went to college in North Carolina, where I was able to foster my dueling interests in art and science. After college, I moved to NYC initially for art, but paid the bills by tutoring math and science. I began exploring educational neuroscience because I wanted to understand how experiences during learning can shape the way we learn and remember, and how this could inform my teaching.

It was with these intestests in learning and memory that I began working for Dr. Daphna Shohamy at Columbia University. There, I studied cognitive and neural mechanisms supporting learning, memory, and decision-making using brain imaging techniques such as fMRI as well as behavioral measures, both in control and patient populations.

I received my PhD from Dartmouth College in Dr. Jeremy Manning's lab. My work at Dartmouth was based at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience and computer science. I was primarily focused on building brain models as well as exploring the network dynamics related to cognition, all while building computational skills and using and developing new techniques.

Next, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at Brown University working with Dr. Frederike Petzschner. At Brown, I focused on computational psychiatry, developing reinforcement learning tasks and associated behavioral modeling to assess differences in avoidaance learning in chronic pain patients as compared to acute pain patients and healthy controls. I have been involved in developing a chronic pain experience sampling app, SOMA collecting longitudinal pain data.

I am now an assistant professor at the University of Montana. My research focuses on machine learning applications in cognitive neuroscience.