Georgia Institute of Technology Georgia Tech - School of Psychology

My research focuses on three major areas: (a) understanding and improving worker well-being, (b) temporal dynamics in team contexts, and (c) research methods. Collectively, my research seeks to improve our understanding of optimal human functioning more generally, across time, and within
specific contexts (e.g., organizational, teams).

My research focuses on how managing work and family affects the health and well-being of individuals and their family members. Specifically, my work examines multiple facets of health (including social, emotional, behavioral, physical, and well-being), with a particular focus on physical and physiological health outcomes.

My research focuses on how leaders can improve the efficacy and well-being of their subordinates. This includes influencing psychological phenomena like trust, interpersonal phenomena like conflict, organizational phenomena like training opportunities, and environmental phenomena like interruptions. I have a particular interest in healthcare teams and leadership. Ultimately, I believe that our science should be readily usable by practitioners, and seek to do research that is both theoretically meaningful and practically important and accessible. 

Research Interests: My goal as a clinical research scientist is to use empirical studies to answer both theoretical and pragmatic questions about optimizing functioning in older adults.  My research interests span and integrate several important areas, including clinical psychology, health psychology, cognitive aging, and lifespan development. 

My early research examined neural mechanisms of sensory-based recollections. I have also become interested in understanding how memory operates under varying demands on attention, and how we arrive at decisions that are based on our memories and perceptions. The lab has been studying perceptual decision making in order to identify neural signals related to different stages of the decision process. We have recently been building from our early research in this area to study how memory, attention, and decision-making abilities change in healthy aging.

I received my degree from Washington University in St. Louis. After moving around a bit (Binghamton University and Stanford University)I arrived at Georgia Tech in 2001. I'm a member of the Cognition and Brain Science, Cognitive Aging, and Quantitative Psychology areas of the department.  

Cognitive control refers to the set of processes by which we direct our actions toward a specific goal. At the most basic level, control processes allow us to translate a presented stimulus into an appropriate motor action. However, these processes and representations quickly become more complex when trying to understand more involved behaviors such as learning peoples names or watching and understanding films.