About Me

I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Penn Lifespan Informatics and Neuroimaging Center, where I work with Dr. Theodore Satterthwaite. I received my PhD from the Harvard/MIT Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology (SHBT), where I trained in multimodal neuroimaging and cognitive neuroscience with Dr. John Gabrieli.

I am currently on the academic job market for tenure-track positions beginning in fall 2027.

My long-term research goal is to inverstigate how the brain develops across infancy, childhood, and adolescence, how early-life experiences and risk factors alter developmental trajectories, and how those differences relate to later cognition and mental health. Much of my work centers on white matter and utilizes advanced diffusion MRI, longitudinal modeling, large-scale datasets, and neuroinformatics.

I am currently supported by an NICHD K99/R00 award, Generalizable Growth Charts of Thalamocortical Development in Early Childhood. This work uses longitudinal imaging from the HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study together with clinically acquired pediatric MRI to characterize early thalamocortical development, examine how gestational age shapes developmental trajectories, and test whether patterns learned from carefully controlled research studies generalize to routine clinical imaging.

Looking ahead, I hope to build a research program that connects three related questions: What does typical brain development look like across early life? How do prenatal, perinatal, medical, and environmental factors shift those developmental trajectories? And how can we develop neuroimaging methods that are robust enough to study these questions across both research cohorts and healthcare systems? Ultimately, I am interested in whether developmental trajectories can help us understand when risk for later cognitive and psychiatric difficulties first begins to emerge.

I am also deeply committed to open and reproducible science. I contribute to open-source neuroimaging tools including QSIPrep, QSIRecon, XCP-D, and Nilearn, and I serve as a moderator for the NeuroStars community forum. I enjoy developing and teaching workflows that make neuroimaging analyses more transparent, reproducible, and accessible to other researchers.

Earlier in my career, I studied the neural systems supporting reading and reading disability. During my PhD, I combined diffusion MRI, fMRI, and behavioral measures to study individual differences in reading as well as changes in white matter accompanying intensive reading intervention. Before graduate school, I earned my BSE and MSE in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania, where I worked with Dr. Michael Kahana on intracranial EEG methods applied to human memory research. I later worked in Dr. Brian Edlow’s Laboratory for NeuroImaging of Coma and Consciousness, studying neural biomarkers of recovery following severe brain injury.

Outside of research, I enjoy running, cooking (especially smoking meat), and performing music as a jazz percussionist (primarily vibraphone).