Hi.

I am a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech in the Fear Lab. I have a PhD in Cognitive Science from UC Merced. Before that, I studied biology at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali, India.

My research examines how individual decision-making and social interaction scale into collective outcomes, ranging from collective intelligence and effective coordination to polarization, conflict, and breakdowns in collaboration—revealing when social interactions are adaptive and when they become maladaptive, harming individual and collective well-being.

I combine interactive, real-time social experiments and computational modeling to ask: (i) how individuals make adaptive decisions under cognitive, social, and environmental constraints and affordances, (ii) how social interactions and communication interact with individual decision-making and socio-cognitive dynamics, and (iii) how local interactions give rise to emergent group- and network-level dynamics.

Currently, I am investigating how decisions and social interactions unfold in both collaborative and adversarial environments, especially when individuals hold differing preferences or beliefs—from coordinating under risk in multiplayer foraging tasks to debating opposing viewpoints in online spaces, where such interactions can escalate into polarization.