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About Me
My Philosophy
Philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti famously remarked, "The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again." Our brains naturally simplify the world around us, but I often wonder what happens when we challenge ourselves to do the opposite – to look closer and embrace complexity. I have now gotten into the habit of naming the individual features of birds when I see them (which probably deeply pains my partner), but I like the reminder. There is almost always more to life than first meets the eye, that is, if we decide to look hard enough.
I try to approach both life and research this way. I believe there is rarely such a thing as too much curiosity, thought, or interest. When something catches my attention, I want to understand why it works, where it doesn't work, and from there, what it might be missing. I become very invested in the things I care about. I like to think through a research problem long after I probably should have stopped; I like to learn a completely new skill because a project/task calls for it; and, I like to try to understand others to the best of my ability and capacity. Sometimes this comes at the expense of my energy, but fortunately I have quite a bit of that too, so I tend to think of the two as a counterbalance!
However, curiosity is inherently limited, for we only know from our own perspectives. Therefore, I try to listen, and I mean that fairly literally. As a friend and colleague, I enjoy hearing how someone arrived at a conclusion, particularly when it is different from mine. Disagreement can be uncomfortable, but it makes me curious. What are they seeing that I am not? What experiences or assumptions brought them there? I may leave the conversation unchanged, but I rarely leave it without having learned something about the other person. To me, listening is another form of looking closely, with curiosity.
As counterintuitive as it may seem, psychology has made me appreciate this all the more. In our methods and theories, we are required to compress complexity. We collect many individual experiences and look for the "throughline" or pattern that emerges from them. For example, we average scores using an assessment that was derived from a theory, then ask how that theory holds up across groups (i.e., is it universal?). While I'm interested in these patterns, frankly, I'm a multitude of times more interested in what gets lost during that compressive process. Someone will always fall outside the average, for instance; or, sometimes, an intervention that helps most people may do very little for someone else. Even constructs that are tidy on paper become much messier when you examine how they actually appear in a person's life. And like many, I have experienced this personally from the perspective of a client in a therapeutic setting.
I think this is the point where curiosity and listening become action for me. I don't particularly enjoy identifying a limitation and then leaving it untouched. My first thought is usually: okay, so what could we do about it? I know not every problem has a simple solution, but I believe every problem is solvable – and sometimes it is a grueling process. I was reminded of this at the Association for Science Communicators conference in 2025, when Dr. Raven Baxter spoke about scientists sometimes needing to be trend setters. I absolutely loved the idea because it gives scientists permission to do more than follow prescriptive ways of working. If a method for testing a theory or intervention (or communicating science) does not currently exist, someone has to be willing to try it. If we cannot reach the public through conventional means, then, perhaps, we have to be more unconventional. As a scientist, I want to be one of those trend setters, and in many ways, I have already been.
When I began developing the serious board game, Curse of Ironbrook, for example, there was no requirement that I turn it into a video game. Doing so meant teaching myself skills I didn't have, as well as undergoing a dramatic reconceptualization of the project. But I saw this as an opportunity to challenge both myself and the intervention itself. I wondered, if I could build something more immersive, would it be more effective too? Whether the answer proves to be yes or no, I care most about being willing to ask the question and do the work needed to find out.
The next step in my career is to pursue graduate school. Here, I don't expect my personal philosophy to make work easier. For one, looking closely at questions tends to make them messier. Second, listening to others and gaining perspectives tends to complicate both our intuitive and, often, scientific theories. And finally, trying to change a process sometimes means I devote a lot of time to work that fails. That said, I will always try to choose the harder process if it means the result could be better; and I will always choose the messier process if it means we get closer to the truth.
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