My Work
My serious-game work first began in a Psychology of Serious Games course taught by my mentor, Dr. Erica Kleinknecht. There, my colleague, Micah Antick-Oslund, and I developed a board game, The Curse of Ironbrook, with a very serious purpose: to improve emotion-regulation skills in college-aged students. After the course ended, I continued working closely with Dr. Kleinknecht and my colleagues to (a) revise the board game and (b) develop a working video game prototype in Unreal Engine for research purposes. In the fall and spring, we will test both versions to assess how effectively they meet our learning objectives.

I have presented this work, as well as serious game work more broadly, at two conferences: Pacific's Undergraduate Psychology Conference and the Western Psychological Association (WPA), respectively. 

My Work 

• The Identity Project
  My colleague Daria Tsybina and I are co-authoring an empirically grounded workbook for college students navigating identity and purpose. The project grew out of Memory, Meaning, & You, a class project that we have since expanded into a six-chapter workbook grounded in contemporary psychological science. We also created PsychedWorkbooks.com as a platform for publishing this and future projects.
  Anticipated publication is Fall 2026.

• Terry and the Digital Forest
  Created in PSY 206: Cognitive Psychology, Terry and the Digital Forest uses an adventurous children's story to communicate research on the strengths and limitations of artificial intelligence. Our project uses storytelling as a way to shape how children and their parents understand and interact with AI.
  Explore the project here.

• Essays
  I also enjoy thinking about how psychological science can help us answer interdisciplinary questions.
  See "What The Brain Can Teach Us About Government," a public-facing piece using recent cognitive psychology and neuroscience findings to rethink political polarization.

My Work
My service work extends far, and it has helped me connect with my wider community. 

• Harm Reduction
  Alongside two colleagues, I designed the Boxer's Hardcore Harm Reduction, an educational campaign focused on opioid harm reduction at Pacific University. We distributed nearly 500 harm-reduction bookmarks across campus and designed interactive games to spread awareness on the subject (explore the project here). 

• Student Leadership
  Through the Pacific Undergraduate Psychology Society (PUPS), Undergraduate Student Senate (USS), and Curriculum & Standards Committee, I have worked on some of the gears that help an institution run. As co-founder and President/VP/Treasurer of PUPS, I have spearheaded events, managed budgets, and designed surveys; through USS and the Curriculum & Standards Committee, I have raised and advocated for student concerns while collaborating with faculty and administrators.

• Teaching and Mentorship
  As a Teaching Assistant for Ethics & Society, serving my third term, I have supported students through course material and civic-engagement projects, from early development through completion. Much of the role has involved being available to answer student concerns, helping students plan and execute their civic engagement work, clarifying in-class content, and helping instructors grade. I am incredibly passionate about teaching and cannot wait to grow my mentorship skills in graduate school.

My Work
Methods are often described as the "nuts and bolts" of psychology, but I think we have it backwards. For sandwich lovers, perhaps our constructs and measures are actually the protein, and everything else is filler (lettuce, tomato, onions). Emotion regulation, resilience, coping, rigidity, flexibility, and perfectionism are all examples that appear in my work. These words are surprisingly complicated when we ask what they actually mean to folks. In Ironbrook, for example, we ask participants to complete the phrase, "When I say resilience, you say _____." Every time, their answers vary widely, suggesting different intuitive theories of what resilience even is. As basic as this point seems, I find it very fascinating. Before asking what something predicts or how to change it via an intervention, we must first ask whether we have defined and measured it well. 

• Psychological Rigidity and Maladaptive Coping
  Measurement was especially important in my research on psychological rigidity and maladaptive coping. We studied several related transdiagnostic processes, including perfectionism, rumination, and emotion-regulation "flexibility" (ERF). We repeatedly encountered overlapping constructs and inconsistent approaches to measurement, especially with psychological rigidity and ERF. I want to continue asking where these constructs end and if current measures are actually capturing their phenomenology.

• Office of Institutional Research and Assessment (OIRA)
  My work in Pacific's OIRA provided an applied view of this same process. Across projects involving student success, student concerns, and broader institutional outcomes (e.g., NSSE, BCSSE), I worked closely with the products of assessment. I saw firsthand how much asking the right questions matters, as does measuring them sensibly.