I study morality in the real world: the often-invisible judgments people make about whose well-being matters, what people deserve, and when we are responsible for one another. And I am an NIH T32 Postdoctoral Fellow at Pennsylvania State University working with Dr. Daryl Cameron in the Empathy and Moral Psychology Lab. 

My interest in these questions began in an introductory moral philosophy course I took pass/fail at Princeton. I was drawn to the strange clarity of philosophical thought experiments: cases that make our intuitions about harm, obligation, fairness, and sacrifice visible enough to examine. But much of everyday morality is harder to see. People make moral valuations constantly—in deciding whether someone is trustworthy, whether another person’s pain is serious, whether generosity will be exploited, or whether someone is genuinely humble—often without recognizing those judgments as moral ones at all.

My early work asked what extraordinary altruists can reveal about those hidden processes. By studying people who have donated a kidney to a stranger or undertaken other unusually costly acts of helping, I examine how people value others’ welfare and how they make moral judgments about care, obligation, and sacrifice. I have also studied the gap between how generous people actually are and how generous we assume people from different social or political groups will be.

My current work extends this approach to moral processes that are especially difficult to measure. I am interested in how people devalue others’ pain or need; how fears of exploitation shape cynicism, cooperation, and support for social policies; and how traits such as humility may help explain why some people act more generously than others. These questions are challenging precisely because the relevant judgments are often implicit, socially sensitive, or difficult for people to report accurately. I use experiments, behavioral measures, and psychological models to bring those otherwise invisible moral valuations into view.

I received my PhD in Psychology at Georgetown University under the mentorship of Dr. Abigail Marsh in the Laboratory on Social and Affective Neuroscience. I received my BA in Psychology from Princeton University, where I completed my undergraduate thesis under the mentorship of Dr. Susan Fiske. 

Ultimately, I want to build a clearer empirical account of morality in the real world: how the values people hold, perceive, and infer from one another shape relationships, cooperation, social norms, and public life—and how those valuations meet a world that keeps changing.