At Adobe, I'm an Applied Scientist working to improve GenAI image & video systems. I earned my PhD in Experimental Psychology from UC San Diego, under Dr. Judith Fan @ The Cognitive Tools Lab.

My research statistically compares human vs. model behavior to improve creative technologies related to: text-to-visual & visual-to-visual systems, semantic editing, object recognition, and user intentions

I specialize in how people create and interact with visual media by developing large-scale benchmarks to compare human vs. model behaviors. I do this by generating datasets of 10-100K human responses in order to systematically evaluate people's strategies for using and editing images and videos. This scale of data enables me to statistically measure improvements and regressions in GenAI models (e.g., text-to-image). I work with globally diverse professional photographers & editors, graphic designers, and video creators/editors to better understand human-AI collaboration.

I also collaborate closely with AI Ethics teams to ensure that models do not create or enable the creation of harmful content.

My disseration research focused on understanding how user intentions impacts visual production behavior and downstream interpretation of that content. I evaluated these questions by developing and analyzing large-scale drawing, diagram, and data visualization datasets. During my PhD, I also completed three internships with Adobe Research. My projects developed and improved parameters for video editing LLMs, automatic B-roll augmentation, and model reasoning.

Bio: I grew up on Whidbey Island, WA. As an introverted teen on a rural island, I spent most of my time sketching and hiding away in art studios. After 2 fine arts apprenticeships and double majoring in Philosophy and History of Mathematics & Sciences from St. John's College, I became fascinated by how novel visualizations have catalyzed and served to communicate many major scientific discoveries (e.g., Cartesian coordinate system, periodic table, Vitruvian man). Despite this critical role of visual media in human innovation, relatively little is known about how people communicate in visual form. This question continues to inspire my research.