About Me

Giving a talk about Asian health hazard stereotypes during the 2022 York-UofT Social-Personality Area (YUTSPA) conference.

I am a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, affiliated with Stanford SPARQ and the Department of Psychology (Social Psychology), working with Jennifer Eberhardt, Hazel Markus, and MarYam Hamedani. I completed my Social-Personality Psychology PhD and graduate diploma in Quantitative Methods in 2023 at York University under the supervision of Richard Lalonde and Joni Sasaki. During this time, I was also employed as a biostatistician at SickKids Research Institute, working primarily with Daphne Korczak. I graduated with a BSc in Psychology (specialist honours) at the University of Toronto, Mississauga.

Research Areas

I study the causes and consequences of, and solutions for, cultural clashes. My research focuses on cultural clashes that usually involve the three R's:

Region-based cultures, that are within, between, and across nations (e.g., ethnolinguistic communities, local regions, larger geopolitical regions)
Religion, with an emphasis on understudied, worldwide religious experiences
Race, and how racialized experiences form cultural experiences that are distinct from region and religion-based cultures, and how racialized experiences vary across different social and cultural contexts

I am also interested in how sociocultural experiences in other domains shape psychological processes (e.g., siblings and family experiences, living with disabilities, social class).

The cultural shaping of cognitive and biological mechanisms that underlie social interactions. I study cultural variation in social interactions, with a special focus on two domains. First, I study how culture shapes visual attention processes that shape who we initially attend to (e.g., gaze cueing, mentalizing, people perception). Second, I study how variations in genes (and its interaction with culture) contribute to social interactions, such as prosocial behaviour. In particular, I focus on the influence of dopamine-signaling genes, as these genes are implicated in the acquisition of culture. I also engage in critical issues related to studying culture, cognition, and biology, such as how lay people tend to think of culture as related to biology and how cultural differences are often communicated about in an essentialist manner.
Example publications:
Lay misinterpretations of culture and biology: [PDF]
Culture, self-construal and gaze cueing: [PDF]
Multilingualism and mentalizing: [PDF]

Well-being consequences of cultural clashes. I am particularly interested in examining the well-being consequences of cultural clashes amongst culturally minoritized groups (e.g., racially, religiously, and ethnically minoritized groups). I do this by studying the various pathways these groups experience worse (but sometimes better!) well-being. In this area of research, I have studied meta-stereotypes, cultural mismatch, and social identity as pathways to well-being.
Example publications:
Asian health hazard stereotypes: [PDF]
Cultural mismatch of religiosity across nations: [PDF]

Media-based solutions to reduce cultural clashes. In this new line of research, I focus on how TV and social media can contribute to positive cultural change in viewers' beliefs about culture, diversity, and inequality. With my collaborators, we want to determine which features of racial and cultural representation in the media matter for important psychological consequences, such as racial bias, intercultural curiosity, and perceptions of inequality. With this work, I intend to both theoretically investigate the importance of representation in media and apply the findings to real-world contexts as interventions with practitioners.

Outside of Academia

I was (am?) an artist, so I try to keep up with any kind of artistic endeavors, like life drawing. I also enjoy video games (i.e., just Overwatch) and weight lifting. I am also a casual coding fan and accidentally won first place at my first hackathon (a fun and stressful 72 hours overnight at York University).