About Me
I'm a Yang Post-Baccalaureate Research Scholar in the Kanwisher Lab at MIT. I study how people perceive and reason about the physical world, and whether machine vision models do it the same way, working at the intersection of cognitive science, neuroimaging, computer vision, and machine learning.
I graduated from Hunter College, CUNY in 2025 with a BA and honors in a double major in Computer Science and Theatre (Phi Beta Kappa, McNulty Scholar). At Hunter I did research in the Computer Vision & Robotics Lab and the TIER Lab, and was a teaching assistant and tutor for core CS classes.
Before that, I worked in the theatre industry as a lighting technician, designer, and stage manager. I'm also trained in harp and piano, and in my free time I dance Argentine tango and swim.
Research
LED Brain
A life-size 3D-printed model of my own brain, built from my FreeSurfer surface reconstruction, with 30 LEDs inside that light up brain networks (the Physics Network, V1 + VTC, MT, and the multiple-demand network) for talks and demos. It runs on an ESP32 with WLED, and a browser control page with a 3D view switches between networks over USB or Wi-Fi.
Earlier work
Social Robot Navigation
Vision-based head pose estimation and F-formation analysis so robots (Misty II, Duckiebots) can tell when people are in a conversation and navigate around groups.
Augmented Reality
Mesh building, raycasting, and hand-gesture interaction for a Magic Leap headset in Unity.
Stimulus Generation in Unity
Automated pipeline in Unity, C#, and Python that rendered more than 10,000 short physics videos for research.
Talks & Posters
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What the Physics Network Actually Gives a Force About: fMRI Decoding of Physical Events in the Brain
MIT BCS Cog Lunch, October 2026 · Talk
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A Benchmark Dataset for Perceiving Object Physical Relationships in Human and Machine Vision
MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence, 2026 · Poster
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What the Physics Network Actually Gives a Force About: fMRI Decoding of Physical Event Types Across Visual Scenarios
Tenenbaum Lab (CoCoSci) Flash Talk, MIT, September 2026 · Talk
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A Benchmark Dataset for Perceiving Object Physical Relationships in Human and Machine Vision
Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (CCN), 2026 · Poster
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A Benchmark Dataset for Perceiving Object Physical Relationships in Human and Machine Vision
Vision Sciences Society (VSS), 2026 · Poster 23.341
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Evaluating Object Spatial Relationships in Human and Machine Vision
Yang Collective Retreat, MIT, 2025 · Poster
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Evaluating Object-Object Relationships in Artificial Vision Models
MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP), 2025 · Poster
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Unlike Brains, Pre-trained CNNs do not Encode Current or Predicted Object Contact
MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence, 2025 · Poster
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Decoding Contact Information in Pre-Trained Deep Learning Models
MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP), 2024 · Poster
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Unlike Brains, Pre-trained CNNs do not Encode Current or Predicted Object Contact
Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (CCN), 2024 · Poster
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Socially Aware Robot Navigation with Duckiebots
Hunter College Undergraduate STEM Conference, 2024 · Poster
Side Projects
Things I build for fun, mostly simulations and games you can play in the browser.
Teaching
I teach Python programming, plotting and curve fitting, and machine learning for neuroscience at MIT's Quantitative Methods Workshop (2025–2026), with my own course materials, problem sets, and quizzes.
From 2022 to 2025 I was a teaching assistant and tutor in Hunter's Computer Science department for:
- CSCI 12700 Introduction to Computer Science
- CSCI 13500 / 23500 / 33500 Software Design and Analysis I, II, III
- CSCI 26500 Computer Theory
- CSCI 35000 Artificial Intelligence
- CSCI 35300 Machine Learning
- CSCI 39536 Robotics
I designed role-playing-game-style C++ projects for the Software Design courses and wrote Gradescope autograders that gave personalized feedback on hundreds of student submissions.
Theatre
Before my BA, I earned a diploma with merit in Arts and Theatre Management (technical theatre) from Republic Polytechnic, Singapore (2019), and I've worked freelance as a lighting technician, programmer, and designer, a scenic and puppetry designer, and a stage manager.
At Hunter I was Treasurer, then President, of the student-run Hunter Theatre Company (2021–2024), and received the Baker Fellow Award (2021, 2022) and the Charles Elson Award (2025) for excellence in design and production.
- I designed and handmade more than 20 creatures for May's Mandala (2023), including a caterpillar puppet that grew over the course of the show.
- I designed and fabricated a Monster (2024) using Blender modelling and 3D printing.
- I presented Beyond the Puppeteer: Exploring Performer-Puppet Separation and Agency in Live Performance at the Hunter Undergraduate Research Conference (2025).
- I've also written some short plays.