I am a Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. I participate in the Social Robots Project, the Project on People and Robots, Humanoids@CMU, and RoboOrg (the RI student organization).

I often travel to Japan to collaborate with Hideki Kozima (at NICT in Kyoto) on his Infanoid project.

My thesis work focuses on the use of rhythm in human-robot social interaction.

My main project is called BeatBots, in which I am developing and studying dance-oriented nonverbal play between children and the robots Keepon and Roillo.

I previously worked in the Social Robotics Lab at Yale University, where I received a B.A. in Computer Science & Psychology in 2002 and a M.S. in Computer Science in 2003 (advised by Brian Scassellati and collaborating with autism researchers at the Yale Child Study Center).

I spent the summer of 2004 near Kyoto, Japan, in the Department of Humanoid Robotics and Computational Neuroscience at ATR (supervised by Gordon Cheng and sponsored by NSF & JSPS).

I spent the winter of 2008 in Daejeon, South Korea, in the PES Design Lab at KAIST (generously hosted by Professor Myung-Suk Kim).