Bio

I'm from a small town in Wisconsin, USA called Burlington, where we have a Nestlé factory. It is hot and humid in the summer and cold and snowy in the winter, but people are very friendly anyway.

When the time came to leave Burlington, I attended Northwestern University, near Chicago. I studied cognitive science and philosophy (and also, inexplicably, film-making) and worked in the lab of Lance Rips, looking at intuitions about causal responsibility.

For my Ph.D. work in cognitive psychology, I came to Yale University, where I was advised by Frank Keil. At Yale, my work focused on heuristics and strategies people use to evaluate causal explanations and on intuitive theories we use for making sense of the world. In my dissertation, I argued that humans face steep constraints in assessing hypotheses, that we use a variety of fallible short-cuts to circumvent these limits, and that these same short-cuts are used by many different psychological processes. I showed how these short-cuts lead us to make mistakes in a variety of different areas.

My British journey began with a post-doc at University College London, where I work with David Tuckett on behavioral finance. We argue that people use narratives to make sense of past information, to make projections about the future, and to guide our choices, financial and otherwise.

In 2017, I joined the faculty of the University of Bath School of Management as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Marketing. This was an awesome place to work. My colleagues in behavioural science were both numerous and excellent, and I had the fortune to supervise two outstanding PhD students.

After three years at Bath, I had the opportunity to join the Psychology department at the University of Warwick, where I'm an assistant professor. If you're thinking of doing a PhD, I highly recommend working with us!