Broadly, my research focuses on how people manage privacy and information flows when navigating emerging, untamed socio-technological environments, from “smart” homes equipped with highly sensitive electrical meters to brick & mortar and online services implementing face recognition and other biometric identification practices.

I’m currently exploring a rapidly-growing corner of the heath IT ecosystem: health apps and wearable self-quantification sensors, looking at how people make decisions about sharing health data across a range of social media platforms, and how their judgments and preferences could inform privacy-protective social policy. My research is supported by the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing (ISTC-SC).

My science & technology policy interests are heavily informed by my background in cognitive science. In 2006, I completed my Ph.D. in cognitive and perceptual psychology at the University of Washington. My dissertation focused on selective and divided attention — particularly, the way that deafness alters the distribution of visual attention across complex objects. With my thesis advisor David Corina, I researched a variety of topics about nerual plasticity, human cognition, and high-order vision, including the neural underpinnings of sign language phonology, object recognition, and human motion perception.