Hello! I’m a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton Neuroscience Institute. I’m interested in how people pursue and switch between goals. Human life is organised into sequences of discrete goals: seeking food, getting rest, applying for jobs. The demand for us to flexibly switch between different goals leads to a number of computational trade-offs on different timescales – deciding when to abandon or persist with ongoing tasks and how to structure learning across tasks. In my research I have investigated these trade-offs using a combination of computational modelling (e.g. RL and linear neural networks), neural imaging (fMRI) and working with clinical populations (e.g. patients with prefrontal brain damage). I am currently a C.V. Starr fellow with Yael Niv at Princeton.

Before joining Princeton in September 2025, I did my PhD at the University of Oxford with Christopher Summerfield, Jill O’Reilly, and Nils Kolling. In my early doctoral work, I studied mechanisms supporting persistence with goals (in Nature Human Behaviour here) and planning (in Journal of Neuroscience here). I used computational models of behaviour and fMRI to explore these mechanisms in healthy people and individuals with prefrontal brain damage. In later work with Chris Summerfield, I studied the question of why new learning sometimes interferes with prior knowledge and sometimes doesn’t, in humans and artificial neural networks. In particular, I studied trade-offs between transferring knowledge to new settings, and avoiding forgetting. You can read more about our findings comparing humans and ANNs in this preprint.