My hope is to recruit individuals who are passionate about understanding social interactions and their behavioral outcomes. I am looking for people with different backgrounds and technical skills, and with a passion to integrate experiments with computational modeling and analysis of data from digital media. No one is likely to have all these skills (or any of them) on the first day, but my hope is to work with people who want to invest the energy required to learn. Engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians with no formal knowledge in social sciences are also very welcome. I especially want to encourage first-gen students and members of minority groups to contact me. This is the place for you!
Research Assistants. Most research assistants in the lab are undergraduate or pre-doctoral students who hope to gain experience/recommendation to apply to graduate school in psychology or organizational behavior. We have some paid jobs, but these fill up quite quickly.
Graduate Students. Harvard Business School often accepts PhD students to the program when their research agenda fits to more than one particular faculty member. If you are interested in working with me, please have that in mind. In your email, in addition to your CV and short description of interests, please suggest other faculty who may be relevant to your interests. If you are a graduate student who is interested in collaborating, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Post-Docs. Calls for post-docs based on internal funding will be posted here when they become relevant. If you are interested in applying to a Harvard grant, or have external funding, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Join Me
Questions I ask:
What are the processes that make groups emotional?
One of the most basic insights in social sciences is that a group of people is more emotional than an array of separate individuals. But what exactly causes increased emotionality in groups? I attempt to map the way emotional interactions contribute to increased group emotionality and how these increased emotions influence group processes such as polarization, collective action and conflicts.
How can emotions be regulated?
In many situations, experiencing or expressing certain emotions may not be helpful for us to achieve our individual or group goals. In these cases, we often try to regulate our emotions or those of people around us. I examine which strategies are most useful for emotion regulation? And how is emotion regulation impacted by social and group processes?
How does technology impact the way we express and experience emotions?
In the digital age, we are constantly exposed to more emotions by more people than ever. Technology not only amplifies psychological processes, but also provides us with an opportunity to examine psychological processes, at the individual and macro levels.
Loneliness: how does lack of meaningful social interactions influence us?
One of the biggest problems in the modern era is loneliness. I try to understand the factors that contribute to loneliness and whether these can be addressed. My research focuses on social tendencies and behaviors that are associated with loneliness, and ways to mitigate these tendencies.