Bio
I come from a small countryside village in South-West England in an area called the Jurassic Coast. This part of the UK is known for its beautiful scenery, rolling green hills, and incredible beaches. Most of my family are still in the UK, so I enjoy going back from time to time.
I studied MPhys Astrophysics with a Year Abroad at the University of Southampton. I got involved with many different clubs and ended up being the Secretary for the Piano Society, captaining the University Men's Badminton 2nd Team, and enjoyed being the Social Secretary for the Badminton Society, organizing events for the largest society on campus. Highlights from that time include 2 weeks in Tenerife designing space telescopes and investigating binary stars using 3 ground telescopes, as well as 2 summer research projects with Prof. Mark Sullivan studying supernovae. I enjoyed putting on concerts with the Piano Society and playing at local venues, and traveling around the UK & The Netherlands for badminton.
My final year abroad was at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. There, I explored magnetic braking with Dr. Cecilia Garraffo and Dr. Jeremy Drake by conducting 3-D magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of stellar winds to simulate the environments surrounding binary star systems for my thesis work. During my last semester learning about the universe, I became curious about another complex and fascinating system that's a bit closer to home. I audited Harvard & MIT cognitive science classes and spoke with experts in the Boston area before deciding to pursue a master's in neuroscience.
This led me to London, where I completed an MSc entitled "Music, Mind and Brain" at Goldsmiths College. It was a unique program combining music psychology with neuroscience, focusing on both the biological and cognitive aspects of musical behavior. I had the pleasure of working with Prof. Joydeep Bhattacharya FRSA to explore interactions between human hearing, vision, and perception for my master's project—an EEG experiment studying the neural correlates of a correspondence between pitch and visual motion. This was a really fun year, and it allowed me to get back into my music while learning some very cool things about how sound affects our brain! I have fun memories of founding the Goldsmiths Jazz Society and helping organize a conference on creativity. I also became more interested in coding — attending hackathons and taking a class on machine learning.
After graduating in 2018, I moved back to Boston and spent a few months teaching math to schoolchildren before starting as a technical research associate at MIT. There, I worked with Dr. Aude Oliva in her Computational Perception and Cognition Lab. The lab combined human perception/cognition, computer vision (visual AI), and cognitive neuroscience to study how perception and cognition are realized in humans and machines. I spent 5 years in the lab, in charge of a number of duties including programming, running experiments, and data analysis & visualization for neuroimaging (MEG/fMRI) and behavioral (human psychophysics & online) studies. I also helped organize large-scale public challenges and workshops, such as GANocracy and The Algonauts Project. I managed lab equipment, finances, and computational resources/storage, as well as providing web development for lab/project websites, and scheduling meetings/events and other administrative duties. I was involved in group projects with industry partners like Meta, to study action prediction for first-person videos, as well as many group projects within academia with researchers from MIT, other parts of the US and Canada, and Germany.
Click here to read more about my research projects and publications.
I've played piano for most of my life and enjoy funk, blues, jazz, and contemporary styles as well as anything improvised. In my spare time, I love to compose piano music, play badminton,
draw, juggle, travel, and meet new people. Whenever I'm in a city, I try to check out a jazz club that I haven't been to before. You can see some of my
music and art here.
