FAQ

Yes, I am accenting graduate students in the 2026-2027 admission cycle.

You will need to apply to the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences graduate program through the USC Office of Graduate Admissions. A full outline of the application procedure can be found here. and the application portal is here.

If you would like to work with me, please make sure to indicate my name on your application.

The application itself is pretty standard in terms of asking for a personal statement and letters of recommendation.

To ensure that everyone has a fair chance, I generally do not take meetings with prospective students. I do, however, look forward to reading your application materials if you decide to apply!

To learn more about the basic process of applying to psych grad programs, Meltem Yucel has compiled a list of grad school resources and grad school information sessions that she makes available on her website. I highly recommend checking it out to help with your questions about graduate school. Natalie Vélez also has a ton of resources that she describes on this webpage, about halfway down under the “applying to graduate school” heading.

Basically though, if you are applying to work with me, I want to know what it is about science that excites you and why it is you want to work with me. Ideally, you are clearly able to communicate these things through your writing and by briefly referencing the work you’ve done in the past. A PhD takes a long time and a ton of effort so, really make sure that you are not only clear in your writing but also clear with yourself about why you want to pursue a PhD.

Our lab is a basic science lab focused on cognitive development. We use behavioral and neuroscience methods to answer questions about infant perception, cognition, and development. I am particularly interested in trying to understand how knowledge or representations in the brain change over time. Projects going on in my lab include:

1. Understanding early speech and music responses in the brain to better understand how the brain supports language acquisition in the first year. For a related publication, read this paper. 
2. Investigating the perceptual and social information represented by infants’ brains as they look at faces. Related publications can be found here, here, and here.
3. How whole-brain, segregated networks emerge to support domain-specific cognitive development.
4. What role do the striatum and cerebellum have in supporting cognitive development. For related papers, see here, here, and here.
5. How does the brain help us we understand other people’s physical experiences like pain and pleasure?

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to graduate school and mentor / mentee relationships. The most important thing is that you are excited about questions that we could work on together, that you are curious and ambitious, and that you have some background in cognition, neuroscience, and/or computation.

Graduate school is time for you to learn skills, develop intellectually, and investigate scientific questions in new and interesting ways. These tasks take a long time so having a clear understanding of why you want to be in graduate school and why you want to learn in this environment is important.

In terms of specific skills, the work we do in our lab requires a substantial amount of computation. So, comfort with coding is important. Ideally, you will also be comfortable holding very young infants and interacting with their caregivers.