Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Computational Cognitive Neuroscience, Vision, Social Perception, Neural Networks

Humans see the world in rich social detail. In just a fraction of a second, we not only detect the objects and faces in our environment, but also quickly recognize people’s emotions, goals, actions, and social interactions. How does the human brain extract all of this complex information with such speed and ease? The goal of my research is to understand how humans recognize and understand social information from visual input, with a focus on recognizing others’ actions and social interactions. Although social perception feels effortless, human actions and interactions pose many unique computational challenges beyond other aspects of vision: they are relational and highly dynamic, and as a result remain a challenge for even the best artificial intelligence (AI) systems. My lab aims to understand these complex processes in neurotypical adults, AI systems, and recently, in autism. To achieve these goals, we use a combination of human behavior, neuroimaging, advanced computational modeling and AI. Before joining Johns Hopkins in 2019, I was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT and Harvard in the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines working with Nancy Kanwisher and Gabriel Kreiman. I completed my PhD at MIT where I was advised by Tomaso Poggio.