About Me
I am a second-year PhD student in Arizona State University's Department of Psychology working under Dr. Athena Aktipis. I apply network analysis methods to understand the dynamics of distributed cognition within sociotechnical systems, particulary those systems that characterized by safety-criticality.
During my undergraduate education I studied the dynamics between individuals during emergency evacuations, which first drew my attention to how collective cognition is shaped by the structure of the networks through which information moves. I pursued this further after graduating, spending a year working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency on disaster preparedness and response through the AmeriCorps FEMA Corps program. After many years leading production teams in the manufacturing sector, I've returned to an academic environment to dive deeply into the structure of distributed cognition in the domains I find of most consequence: those characterized by high-stakes environments where the cost of failure is high and the margin for error is small.
Research
Current Focus
The control room has always had so much aura, hasn't it? To think of the term conjures up images of hard-nosed operators staring intently at instruments, shouting out to the room as readouts change while the next layer up listens and consolidates and responds somehow in kind. These wonderful complexes of people and their tools, working as a unit to maintain and execute actions within an environment conducive to the accomplishment of larger shared objectives, are systems of distributed cognition--that is to say, they are structures that process information in their own right above and beyond that which is processed by their constituent parts. They are an example par excellence of our human capacity for collectively leveraging sociality, tools, and environment to smooth and extend how we act with agency in the world around us. My research focuses on these complexes in safety-critical domains and asks how the layered network structures that comprise them function when they are confronted with anomalous information.
Ongoing Work
- Field work measuring physiological entrainment between musicians in live collaborative musical improvisation.
- *Bespoke graduate research agenda based off Current Focus loading...*