Research and academic positions

Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer

• Taught two sections of an undergraduate research seminar on materialism, life aspirations, mass media, and well-being, and one section of an undergraduate research practicum in which students carried out their own studies
• Wrote an extensive review and synthesis of the literature on morality as a basic psychological need. It evaluates the accumulated evidence against established criteria for a psychological need, describes how the need is experienced, and proposes a process model linking moral personality to well-being
• Published one manuscript and prepared and submitted four others for publication, spanning moral motivation, character formation in education, goal setting, and people's responses to AI

Postdoctoral Researcher

• Worked on a DFG-funded project on the benefits of professional social media use. The project asks how networking and routinely skimming social media feeds build ambient awareness of who knows what in a professional network, combining a year-long measurement burst field study with experience sampling and experiments on how accurate and how automatic this awareness is
• Collaborated in a multi-lab team that collected a six-wave longitudinal dataset on people's perceptions of, use of, and experiences with AI
• Led a manuscript from this dataset on whether experiences with AI, such as feeling that it is creepy, and personality dynamics drive people away from AI. Trust in and delegation to AI declined across waves even as users kept rating AI as useful, and conscientiousness was the most consistent predictor of delegating less
• Co-presented longitudinal research on COVID-related fears and media consumption at an international communication conference
• Informally advised the lab's PhD students

Instructor

• Taught courses to undergraduate and graduate students:
  • Scientific Communication in English
  • Masters Research Seminar and Research Practicum in consumer and media psychology

Senior Postdoc

• Conducted research to strengthen the scientific and technological foundations for understanding, supporting, and improving the human mind and increasing flourishing
• Co-created an international community for Life Improvement Science and hosted its inaugural conference, which drew more than 600 registrants from around the world
• Collaborated on five digital tools for habit formation, goal setting and pursuit, attentional control, and emotion regulation
• Served as methodological, psychometric, or data-analytic lead or advisor for at least a dozen studies
• Mentored a PhD project and candidacy in the International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems

Visiting Research Scholar

• Helped lay the foundation for a new character-based curriculum for engineering students, which led to an $8.6 million grant from the Kern Family Foundation
• Translated philosophical and psychological research into educational strategy, a faculty guidebook on virtues, and a peer-reviewed publication for engineering educators
• Worked with engineering faculty to support curricular efforts, develop assessment metrics, and lead workshops

Teacher-Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow

• Developed and taught undergraduate and graduate courses in personality, psychometrics, and R
• Applied advanced multilevel modeling to highly nested data on social support seeking within networks
• Conducted a psychometric evaluation of a new scale measuring tendency to produce bullshit as a personality trait

Postdoctoral Research Associate

• Worked with academic and nonacademic partners across fields and countries to advance ten lines of grant-funded research on morally exceptional people
• Wrote and submitted 9 manuscripts that were accepted for publication
• Developed a psychometric assessment of moral character using cutting-edge construct validation techniques
• Tested hypotheses with structural equation modeling and multilevel models of experience sampling data
• Presented two streams of work at conferences at Oxford: One on death reflection as a lever for virtuous life-goal selection and one on educational strategies for virtue development

Senior Scientist

• Built and led a research team studying goal pursuit, goal frustration, and emotion regulation
• Taught graduate and undergraduate courses in motivational theory and statistics and statistical computing
• Advised multiple Masters and PhD students as well as a number of Bachelors thesis research teams
• Collaborated with research partners across Europe, Asia, and North America

Instructor of Psychology

• Developed two new courses from scratch, Health Psychology and a Motivation Seminar
• Taught five courses independently and one with two senior colleagues
• Mentored six students through 20-week research projects and their career planning

Research Coordinator and PhD Researcher

• Coordinated an NSF-funded project on individual differences in executive function and racial bias using behavioral and ERP methods (2011–2012)
• Carried out dozens of lab experiments, online surveys, field and longitudinal studies, archival analyses, and psychophysiological studies
• Managed teams of 5 to 15 research assistants for behavioral, questionnaire, and EEG data collection

PhD, Social and Personality Psychology

MA, Social and Personality Psychology

BA, Psychology with Honors, double major in Philosophy