How does the mind work? I would like to understand what makes us intelligent, and why we make mistakes at times. As a computional cognitive scientist, I study language processing, dialogue, and decision-making. My work is computational in two ways. (1) I use data science techniques for inference from large-scale datasets and experiments. (2) I create computational, cognitive and statistical models to contribute to a unified theory of cognition. My work in cognitive science is aided by computational linguistics; my research in computer science is inspired by cognition.

My research group at Penn State is primarily supported by the National Science Foundation (several recent projects).

In January 2019, I will be joining Google. I will continue my work as a tenured Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Technology.