I'm a cognitive psychologist with a career built at the intersection of rigorous measurement, applied statistics, and real organizational problems. My PhD training at the University of Pittsburgh placed me in Charles Perfetti's Language and Literacy lab, where I studied how the brain builds meaning from text. That work spanned theoretical models of reading comprehension, EEG/ERP studies of word-to-text integration, and the mechanisms that separate skilled from less-skilled readers. That foundation shapes everything I do: I care about how things actually work, not just whether they appear to work.
After graduate school, I co-founded Affective Health, a digital assessment and behavior change platform that grew to serve 16,000+ users across academic and applied settings. The platform drew on Ecological Momentary Assessment methodology, capturing experience closer to when it happens rather than relying on recall. That work produced measurable outcomes: 15-16% improvements in key performance constructs, across more than 20 client engagements totaling over $1M in projects.
I currently manage research administration for the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh: a $50M+ portfolio of grants from NIH, NSF, IES, DOD, and major private foundations. The work demands the same thing the rest of my career has: translating complex, multi-stakeholder data into decisions that hold up under scrutiny.
JAB Lab is my independent research operation. Projects outside the day job: D3 visualizations, AI hallucitation studies, violence research dashboards, and whatever I'm currently absorbed in.