Most of us have an experience of self. Our behaviors reflect the belief that we are autonomous individuals with coherent identities and a sense of free will. I’m interested in exploring why this form of self-representation and sense of agency emerges. Are there functional advantages to these cognitive phenomena? I’m exploring this question with Robert Yang by building “models of self” in a deep reinforcement learning framework.

I’m also co-advised by Josh McDermott, where I study how humans integrate vision and sound to form a coherent percept. Prior to starting my PhD at BCS, I was a post-bacc student here, and before that I studied Computer Science at Kansas State University for undergrad.