I’m currently an associate professor of psychology at College of Staten Island (CSI) and The Graduate Center, CUNY (City University of New York), with previous stints at York College, CUNY,  Manchester University (a small liberal arts college in Indiana) and adjunct instructor at Baruch College, CUNY and Barnard College.

I earned my BA in psychology at New York University, where my passion for research was first ignited while working in Elizabeth Phelps’ lab. I gained further experience working in Jason Mitchell’s lab at Harvard, before completing my PhD in neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medical College (NYC) under the tutelage of BJ Casey.

I teach undergraduate and graduate courses, mostly at CSI and sometimes at The Graduate Center. I also run the CogEmo Lab at CSI where my students and I study emotional learning and memory processes, with a focus on classical fear conditioning as a model paradigm. Current studies are mostly centered around exploring factors that impact acquisition and regulation of conditioned fear.  A primary goal of the research is to understand the role that emotional learning processes play in the development of fear-related disorders such as PTSD and phobia, with the hope that this research will set the stage for better diagnosis and more effective clinical treatments.

I’m also interested in contributing to the effort to build a more robust and replicable corpus of knowledge in the psychological sciences; towards that end, I’ve worked on several team-science projects with the Psychological Science Accelerator, a globally distributed network of psychological scientists who pool intellectual and material resources to address “big questions rooted in theory and/or real world problems.” I’m also currently working with a group of international collaborators on a couple of fear-learning related team science projects. I’ve also recently developed an interest in research focused on pedagogy, teaching and learning. One recently published study explored students’ attitudes and beliefs about what constitutes effective teaching. I’m currently in the planning stages for more teaching and learning research.

Prior to entering academia, I spent many years as a professional touring and session musician.