Senior Lab Members
Ashley Thomas
Assistant Professor
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Ashley’s research is focused on how humans think about social relationships across development, answering broad questions such as “What is caregiving?” and “How do people think about social change?”. Check out Ashley’s website for more information about her work!
Denisse Lopez
Lab Manager
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Denisse graduated from UC San Diego in 2022 with a B.S. in Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience and is planning to pursue a PhD in Psychology. Her research interests surround implicit bias, the development of intergroup biases, and children’s ideas of race, class, and inferences about structural inequality.
Emma Yu
Lab Manager
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Emma graduated from Boston University in 2023 with a B.A. in Psychology and is planning to pursue a PhD in the future. She is broadly interested in social cognitive development, particularly how young children think about emotions in relation to fairness and their inferences about close social relationships.
Ashley Leung
Postdoctoral Fellow
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Ashley is a College Fellow in the lab, conducting research on the role of communication in infants’ early social cognition. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago, where she studied children’s communicative development, and the role that parents play in supporting children’s language learning.
Brandon Woo
Postdoctoral Fellow
[email protected]
Brandon’s research program asks how humans come to understand others’ actions and minds, particularly in social contexts. Through studies of infants and toddlers, his research aims to reveal our early-emerging knowledge of other people and to characterize the developmental foundations of human learning, cooperation, and social life more broadly.
Christina Steele
Graduate Student
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Christina is a PhD student in the lab, conducting research on how children and infants’ perceptions of social groups influence their expectations about close social relationships. Christina graduated from the University of Oxford and University of Edinburgh as a Marshall Scholar with M.S. degrees in psychological research and social intervention. She received her B.A. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania as a first-generation college student where she studied the intersection between intergroup and interpersonal relationships. She aims to understand how the human mind navigates the social world to fulfill our need for connection.
Research Assistants
Mia Taylor
Class of 2024
Andrea Ventura
Class of 2024
Megan Richardson
Post-Bacc RA
Nami Enkhbat
Class of 2025
Cecilia Wang
GSE Master’s Student ’24
Haowei Peng
GSE Master’s Student ’24
Shu Xin Ho
Class of 2027