I come from a diverse background of training within the field of cognitive neuroscience, and this has prepared me to be an individual who bridges areas of interest between divisions of psychology. I am broadly interested in the intersection of cognition and emotion. Specifically, I am interested in how individual differences in sensitivity to emotion bias cognitive processing. For example, I have found that different types of anxiety and different genotypes can predict differences in cognitive processing at early stimulus detection, attentional shifting, attentional inhibition, and much later information search and decision-making.

Further, the event-related potentials (ERPs) training I received in graduate school allowed me to develop a model for the differing temporal influences of emotion on information processing. I supplemented this model with structural components by developing expertise in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as a postdoctoral fellow. Such investigations address both basic science questions in cognitive and clinical neuroscience and the intersection of the two, as I predict that certain psychopathologies, such as mood and anxiety disorders, will correspond with exaggerated but predictable patterns of information processing from those observed with individual difference variables.

The cross-disciplinary approach that I take in my research is reflected in my collaborations with social, clinical, and fellow cognitive psychologists, as well as colleagues in molecular bioscience and psychiatry. Additionally, I completed my postdoctoral training in a clinical neuroscience lab, despite receiving my PhD in cognitive psychology. As a result, I am well prepared to contribute to translational research endeavors, taking a unique approach of trying to better understand different networks of information processing through different individual difference variables that have been better vetted in the field of clinical psychology.