Broadly, I am interested in understanding how cognitive and emotional skills, such as cognitive control and emotion regulation, develop, promote health and well-being, and serve as buffers against stress and maladaptive coping strategies, such as unhealthy eating and substance use. I’m also interested in understanding how motivational factors, such as autonomy and intrinsic motivation, affect goal pursuit and self-regulation.

I use univariate and multivariate methods to investigate how the control processes are represented in the brain during decisions to regulate appetitive motivations, how these representations modulate other key nodes responsible for implementing control, and how neural representations during regulation predict behavior within the task and outside the lab.