I am a data scientist, social scientist, and methodologist with a Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University and a background in cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, and multivariate statistics. As of June 2023, I am a Data Science Specialist at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard, providing methods and analysis consulting services and collaborative support to researchers across Harvard and MIT.

I completed my Ph.D in May 2023, advised by Mina Cikara and with Joshua Greene as a secondary advisor, studying the psychological and neural representations of social and political information. I applied methods from neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and statistics to characterize the neural and psychological features of information acquisition and concept learning in laboratory and social settings. The topics of my research included the impact of intergroup biases on evidence-based learning and the representational confusability of facts and opinions. Additionally, I developed multivariate statistical methods with statistician Patrick Mair, including work on exploratory methods for characterizing informational facets in low-dimensional embeddings of complex representational spaces using multidimensional scaling and support vector machines.

Prior to my Ph.D. at Harvard, I received my B.A. in Neuroscience from Dartmouth College in 2016, with minors in Education and Spanish. As an undergraduate at Dartmouth and for two years afterwards as a full time research assistant, I worked in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Learning Laboratory with David Kraemer in the Departments of Education and Psychological and Brain Sciences. In my work at Dartmouth, I used a combination of neuroimaging, behavioral, and classroom-based research to explore the multivariate neural representations associated with concept learning in STEM domains. I have been developing analytical methods to characterize the ways in which the brain supports the knowledge that students acquire in the classroom. This work has resulted in my ongoing collaborations with David Kraemer, as well as prior collaborations with Adam Green at the Georgetown Laboratory for Relational Cognition (Georgetown University).

When I’m not doing science, I’m often making music, and occasionally I build guitars! Recently, I have been studying Indian classical percussion by learning to play the tabla, following in the tradition of my grandfather, Gaurang Yodh, who was a cosmic ray physicist and a sitar player.