About me

Hello, thanks for stopping by! My name is Naiti [IPA: neθi]. Broadly, I’m excited about the intersection of cognitive development and artificial learning. While I’m most drawn to formalizing computational models to characterize children’s social learning, I’m also eager to get involved in using our understanding of child development to craft better algorithms of artifical intelligence.

I’m currently working on my PhD in Psychology at the University of Edinburgh, where I am advised by Hilary Richardson. We are studying structural and functional neurodevelopmental changes as they relate to the behavioral development of theory of mind reasoning (FMI, see Wikipedia or Science Direct).

I graduated from Scripps College in May 2021, where I majored in Computer Science and Neuroscience, advised by Tessa Solomon-Lane and Julie Medero. My senior thesis explored object categorization in infant visual scenes, and was supervised by Bria Long, Michael C. Frank, and John G. Milton. After graduation, I moved to Manhattan and worked as a lab manager at the Hartley Lab at New York University, where I was involved in various projects formalizing models of learning and decision-making as they change over development.

I completed two NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates: over the summer of 2019 at the University of Minnesota, I did research with Katie Tregillus and Steve Engel in the Engel Vision and Imaging Lab, and over the summer of 2020 at Stanford University’s Center for the Study of Language and Information, I remotely worked with Bria Long, George Kachergis, and Mike Frank in the Language and Cognition Lab.

I grew up in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, USA.