About Me

I was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and spent the first three years of my life there before moving to America with my family to California in pursuit of better opportunities.

I started college at Mt. San Antonio College, my local community college in Walnut, California. Thanks to the support of numerous mentors and after earning associate degrees in psychology and political science, I transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, where I earned a bachelors degree in psychology with high distinction and completed an honors thesis.

Upon arriving in Berkeley, I began a research position in Ozlem Ayduk and Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton's Relationships and Social Cognition Lab that would last the rest of my undergraduate studies and turn into a postgraduate lab manager position. During my time as an undergraduate, I also worked closely with Joseph Campos in the Infant Studies Center, was an undergraduate research assistant in Dacher Keltner's Social Interaction Lab, and spent a summer as a research intern in New Haven at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.

I recently completed my PhD in Social and Personality Psychology at Cornell University with a graduate minor in Cognitive Science, where I was advised by Vivian Zayas (chair), Tom Gilovich, and Cindy Hazan. My research at Cornell focused on how people navigate everyday social interaction dynamics. I continue to collaborate closely with my mentors on several ongoing projects.

With Vivian Zayas, I am examining the consequences of ambiguous social interaction dynamics (e.g., what happens when you benefit from social preferential treatment?) and testing ways to foster social connection and mitigate social disconnection. With Tom Gilovich, I am investigating an extension to the spotlight effect that focuses on social connections, conversation and conversation dynamics, and the role of gratitude in costly prosocial actions. In a related line of research, I am working with Ovul Sezer and Gordon Pennycook to examine whether people overestimate, underestimate, or accurately perceive the likelihood and consequences of "being canceled."

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow in the NIMH T32 Training Program in Emotion Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where I work with Paula Niedenthal and study how people come to feel "in sync" during social interactions and when asynchrony can strengthen or weaken social connection.

My research projects are possible because of my wonderful research team.

For fun, I enjoy going to concerts, eating spicy food, watching movies, and supporting the California Golden Bears, Cornell Big Red, and the Wisconsin Badgers. I have a cat named Cucumber.