How do your earliest interactions affect the rest of your life? Why is impulse control so difficult in some contexts but not others? When can we detect warning signs of cognitive decline? What are the characteristics of a successful working dog, and how soon can we tell? Will the puppies outsmart me today? (Invariably, yes.)

​

I recently started as an assistant professor of human-animal interaction in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Arizona. I will be heading up the BRAY (Behavioral Research Across Years) lab, which seeks to answer all the above questions and more within our main study species, the domestic dog.

​

I earned my PhD in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania where I worked with Robert Seyfarth, Dorothy Cheney, and James Serpell. For my dissertation, I partnered with The Seeing Eye, Inc.  to conduct a longitudinal study investigating puppy development, which involved tracking a cohort of 138 puppies from birth until completion of the program. After graduating, I was a post-doctoral research associate at the Arizona Canine Cognition Center (in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Arizona) and Canine Companions, where I studied how early developmental, behavioral, and cognitive factors impact later life outcomes.

 

Prior to UPenn, I earned a B.A. in Psychology and English from Duke University, where I worked at the Duke Canine Cognition Center studying inhibitory control in pet and Canine Companions® service dogs with Evan MacLean and Brian Hare.