I am an incoming Ph.D. student (starting Fall 2025) at the University of Michigan in Josh Ackerman’s Evolutionary Social Psychology Lab. I am interested in our evolved minds and societies.

I have experience conducting evolutionary psychological research and have held various paraprofessional academic roles, including as a research assistant, teaching assistant, statistics tutor, writing tutor, proofreader, behavior technician, and a number of student leadership roles. For my full professional history, check out my CV.

Current Research Projects

In Dr. Kelly Arbeau’s Health Psychology Lab, I am assisting with writing the manuscript for a qualitative study exploring individual’s experience of their self during the pandemic. The manuscript is expected to be under review soon.

Previous Research Projects

Working in Dr. Jaime Palmer-Hague’s Social Neuroendocrinology Laboratory, we investigated effects of parental facial dominance on offspring sex, as predicted by the maternal dominance hypothesis and Trivers-Willard hypothesis. We recruited parent dyads to complete a questionnaire and submit facial photographs, which were later rated by undergraduates for various facial characteristics. In logistic regression models, fathers’ facial dominance, as opposed to mothers’ facial dominance or their interaction, positively predicted the likelihood of having a first-born son. We proposed a mechanism through which parental characteristics, hormones, and mate preferences adaptively influence offspring sex. This paper is published in Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, and it is my first publication! Check it out here.

With the funding of a TWU Undergraduate Student Research Award and the supervision of Dr. Jaime Palmer-Hague and Dr. Kelly Arbeau, we studied religiosity within the behavioral immune system (BIS) framework. Based on prior theoretical work, we review the evidence for and test three hypotheses as potential psychological mechanisms which may explain the relationship between disgust and religiosity using mediation analyses. Results show that more restricted sociosexual attitudes, but not higher traditionalism or ethnocentrism, mediate the relationship between disgust sensitivity and religiosity. This work supports the sexual strategies hypothesis, where individuals who are higher in disgust sensitivity tend to be more religious to facilitate a successful monogamous mating strategy. Ultimately this paper simplifies our understanding of religiosity within the BIS and provide insight into the evolution of motivations for religiosity. The manuscript is currently under review.

My undergraduate honours thesis was a text-analysis study investigating linguistic features of fraudulent research papers to make inferences about the psychology of scientific fraud. Check out the manuscript here and the data and code here.