About me

I’m a Ph.D. student in Cognition and Perception at New York University, where I’m advised by Noga Zaslavsky.

I’m interested in the principles that underlie our ability to efficiently represent the world and in the mechanisms that allow us to arrive at these representations. My projects have focused on:

• how pressure for communicative efficiency can explain variation in semantic typology,
• how such efficiency might emerge from evolutionary dynamics,
• and how optimal lossy compression might shape how people learn concepts.

Before coming to NYU, I spent time at UC Irvine in the departments of Language Science and Logic and Philosophy of Science. Before that I earned an M.S. in computational linguistics at the University of Washington, working with Shane Steinert-Threlkeld at the CLMBR lab. Before that I earned a B.A. in philosophy at UC San Diego.

Here is my cv.