ABOUT ME

As a Ph.D. student I am interested in modeling people’s decisions, identifying factors leading to irrational behaviours and ultimately in developing interventions to elicit better outcomes. I work as a research assistant at the Neuromechanics Lab with Dr. Alaa Ahmed in trying to understand how the brain selects durations associated with reaching movements and how it relates with past and future actions. I also work with Dr. Michael Mozer, who advised me during my M.S. in Electrical Engineering that I obtained in 2017. My masters thesis was focused on developing and solving an optimal control model of people’s behaviour in delayed gratification tasks. Between 2015 and 2017, I spent time interning part-time and full-time (in the summers) at Answeron Inc., building models for predicting and preventing subscriber and employee churn for their clients. My duties included building the code base from scratch in python and maintaining it.

NEWS

  • Jan 2022: I passed my comprehensive exam!
  • July 2021: I was invited to present my work on foraging theory and motor control at Josh Cashaback’s lab at UDelaware.
  • Apr 2021: Dispatch article out in Current Biology summarizing new research out of the Sensorimotor Neuroscience Laboratory at Simon Fraser University on how gaze influences step choice during walking on uncertain terrain!
  • Apr 2021: Presented out foraging and reach vigor work as a poster at the virtual Neural Control of Movement meeting 2021. Thanks to the organizers for putting together a wonderful virtual meeting. You can also access the video recording of the poster presentation here.
  • Nov 2020: Presented my foraging and movement work at MLMC’20! (video link). Also checkout the other talks in the link to learn more about exciting motor control research!
  • Oct 2020: Our work on the link between motor vigor and decision making has also been accepted for a presentation at this year’s (virtual) Motor Learning and Motor Control symposium!
  • Sept 2020: Presented my work on the link between arm reaching effort and decision making during foraging at the Biomechanics Journal Club at CU Boulder.
  • Aug 2020: Had fun helping attendees with git at the virtual ASB Version Control Tutorial organized by Ryan Alcantara, Gary Bruening and Ross Wilkinson.