Hello. I’m Joseph. I am a research coordinator for the Social Learning Lab with Prof. Hyowon Gweon at Stanford University.

I graduated from Cornell University in 2020 with a B.A. in Biology and Society. In the years following my graduation, I developed an interest in cognitive science and developmental psychology. I worked as a research assistant with Prof. Tobi Gerstenberg at the Causality in Cognition Lab, Prof. Mike Frank at the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University and Prof. Laura Niemi at the Applied Moral Psychology Lab at Cornell University. I was born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya.

I am interested in our developing intuitive understanding of the physical and social world. I ask questions like how does our knowledge of objects and agents emerge and how do we distinguish these categories? How do we build our knowledge of the world both as individual learners and as agents embedded in a social world? How abstract or concrete is our developing knowledge in different domains, and how might this be revealed in the kinds of explanations we endorse?

I am also interested in science communication. I co-host the Stanford Psychology Podcast where we invite leading psychologists to share their most recent work. Here are some examples of guests I have interviewed: Chaz Firestone, Ashley Thomas, Anne Scheel, Jay Van Bavel.