I am currently a postdoc working with Rahul Bhui and Abdullah Almaatouq at MIT Sloan. Prior to that, I completed my Ph.D. at MIT and spent two years as a Houlden Fellow at Warwick Business School's Behavioural Science Group. I study how information (or the lack thereof) affects human behavior.

Behavioral Economics
People sometimes act as if they have control over events they know they can't influence, especially when they're under certain kinds of uncertainty. For instance, someone shopping might choose a dress from a boutique over one from a chain store specifically because she liked the chain store dress; her own positive reaction to the chain store dress suggests it will be popular this summer—other people eyeing it in the window will have that feeling too and will buy it—and if it's popular, it will be less striking. I think phenomena like this are an important part of how humans solve the problem of cooperation, and I study them with behavioral experiments and modeling.

Information Theory
I study information transmission via culture with tools I've developed for measuring the flow of memes through minds. These tools are quantitative (in that we end up with bits and so have a common currency), content-agnostic (so we don't have to take a stand about the right questions to ask), and widely applicable (to anything you can parameterize such that a person can guess at what symbol comes next—language, music, chess, etc.). I am applying these techniques to basic questions in cultural evolution, language and communication, education, and management.