I combine my fundamental psychology training with my applied field experience at NASA Ames Research Center (2004-2008) to identify and untangle social and cultural factors affecting teamwork and creativity, particularly in multidisciplinary teams. I am currently the Principal Investigator of a new National Science Foundation grant to study conflict and creativity in multidisciplinary teams. I have developed expertise in several areas, including the social psychology of team creativity, knowledge diversity in teams, and cross-cultural psychology. My research on teams has been applied to aviation, space, and science/engineering domains. I also enjoy using a variety of methods: I have collected and/or analyzed survey, experimental, interview, archival, and audio-video observational data.

I am currently a research associate at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant via the Science of Science Innovation and Policy Program. This work is a natural extension of my postdoctoral fellowship (University of Pittsburgh, NSF, 2008-2011). I completed both the Psychology major and the Science in Society program at Wesleyan University (1994, Phi Beta Kappa), receiving High Honors on my thesis examining student attrition from science and mathematics majors. After college, I worked as a research assistant for Dr. William McAuliffe at the National Technical Center for Substance Abuse Needs Assessment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I earned my M.A. (December 1999) and Ph.D. (December 2003) in Social/Personality Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, collaborating with Drs. Kaiping Peng, Christina Maslach, and Robert MacCoun. I studied social and personality effects on group creativity with Dr. Maslach and co-authored a paper with Dr. MacCoun on bias in the interpretation of scientific evidence. My dissertation, which was funded by an NSF East Asia fellowship, a Northern California Phi Beta Kappa scholarship, and a Sigma Xi grant-in-aid, assessed lay theories of creativity using original survey data from Japan, China, and the United States. With Dr. Peng, I continue to examine the effects of culture on creativity.

From March 2004-August 2008, I was a civil servant Research Psychologist at NASA Ames Research Center. There, I researched team composition and cohesion, organizational risk factors, individual and team selection, and aviation decision-making. I worked in the Distributed Team Decision Making laboratory and the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) laboratory, collaborating with Drs. Judith Orasanu, Christopher Bearman (now at University of South Australia), Alonso Vera, Irene Tollinger, Yuri Tada, and others. My work in the HCI laboratory earned me Ames Spotlight Awards; the HCI lab's work on improving problem reporting software and processes resulted in the whole team receiving Group Achievement Awards from Johnson Space Center and Ames Research Center.

I currently work with a number of collaborators on a variety of projects, including Christian Schunn, members of his lab, and Kevin Kim at the University of Pittsburgh; former colleagues at NASA; and Christopher Bearman at the University of South Australia. I have started new projects with Chunchi Lin at the University of the Air (Japan), Ella Miron-Spektor at Bar-Ilan University (Israel), and Laurie Weingart at Carnegie Mellon University. These projects range from examining the interplay of social and cognitive processes in team innovation to cross-cultural research on creativity.