Introducing the UTK Social Coordination Lab

I will be starting in fall of 2025 as an assistant professor in the psychology department at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

My lab will study how we manage to coordinate our behavior with each other in ways that build deep and lasting social connections.

Most of life’s greatest moments—landing a dream job, learning something new, falling in love—begin with a single positive social interaction. These interactions feel easy to us in the moment, but if we look more closely, we see that social interaction is actually an impressive feat of coordination. When people interact, they must coordinate a cascade of social cues—adapting, moment by moment, to each other’s words, facial expressions, body language, and actions—each of which may vary from culture-to-culture, or even person-to-person.

My research program investigates how we manage this impressive feat of coordination. My research interests include:

• Interpersonal synchrony—when we synchronize with each other, when we don’t, and why some people tend to synchronize more than others.
• Affective communication—the ways we express our own emotions while simultaneously making predictions about how our interaction partner might be feeling.
• Multi-modal social coordination—how our different “channels” of communication (e.g., facial expressions, eye contact, speech, etc.) interact with one another to build a successful conversation.

Join the Lab!

PhD Students

I will be recruiting students for fall of 2026! Reach out if you find the above description of my research interesting and are a person who finds joy and growth in the messiness/failure inherent in the learning process. Bonus points if you have similar interests that you'd like to explore together.

Research Assistants

Are you an undergraduate at UT interested in working in the Social Coordination lab? Fill out this google form and we will contact you for an interview!