What are your current research interests?

My main research interest is in understanding how people make decisions, why people make poor decisions, and how can we help people improve their decisions. I study situations in which there is high uncertainty, time constraints, high workload, and where the environment changes as decisions are being made. I characterize the cognitive processes of human decisions by running experiments with “Microworlds” (interactive games that represent naturalistic decision environments) and by creating computational representations of such cognitive process.

How does what you do in the classroom reflect the impact your field has on the world?

88-312: Dynamic Decision Models and Games, is completely built based on my research and on modeling techniques from the fields of Cognitive Science and System Dynamics. Students will learn a novel perspective of human decision making and the use of models and games to understand how humans make choices in constrained environments, and perhaps learn how to make better choices in the world.

What are some memorable projects you’ve had students do and how do they reflect your goals as an educator?

In the second half of my course, 88-312, students will learn to represent dynamic systems into stock-and-flow diagrams and to implement such models using a computational simulation tool that will allow the students to generate simulations of those dynamic systems and brainstorm about the effects of variable interactions. During COVID lock down, I took the opportunity to present a dynamic model of the causes and effects of variables influencing the accumulation of COVID cases. Students were able to understand theoretical concepts more rapidly and connect those concepts to naturalistic situations they were experiencing at the moment.