Faculty Member
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
University of California, Los Angeles
Personal Statement
For the entirety of my career, my research has focused on elucidating the behavioral, computational, and neural bases of learning, memory, and decision making. For my graduate training, I was awarded a Wellcome Trust Prize Studentship to study for an M.Sc. and D.Phil. in Neurosciences at the University of Oxford. During my D.Phil. I worked with Dr. Matthew Rushworth to investigate decision making and executive function in humans and rodents. This training gave me a strong foundation in neuroimaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging, diffusion weighted imaging), transcranial magnetic stimulation, experimental lesions, and computational approaches to investigate learning and decision making. My graduate research imparted in me the value of a multi-modal approach to address a particular scientific question. For my postdoctoral training, I was awarded a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship to expand my computational toolkit by training in Neuroeconomic (with Drs. Antonio Rangel and John O’Doherty at Caltech) and Bayesian statistical (with Dr. Tim Behrens at Oxford and UCL) techniques and apply these tools to investigate the roles of frontostriatal and frontotemporal networks in constructing, using, and updating predictive models during both reward-guided and social decision making and learning. In my own Learning and Decision Making Lab, first at UC Davis and now UCLA, my primary approach is to integrate mathematical descriptions of the processes underlying learning, task representation, and decision making with advanced analytical techniques, applied to neural data across methods and species. Our research is focused primarily on two interrelated questions: how does the brain (1) build and use ‘cognitive maps’ to make efficient inferences that underpin generalization and flexible decision making; and (2) form and update predictive internal models that specify beliefs about relationships between environmental cues or latent (hidden) causes, our choices, and the outcomes that may follow?
