Bio/CV

paulAtHickoryRun_cropped Brief Bio: I grew up on Long Island, NY, which could have been worse. I received a BA in Physics from Wesleyan University in 2002. Following that, I spent several years as a wandering vagabond in New York City and held a panoply of jobs that included working as an immunology lab tech, an audio engineer, a movie production assistant, a film transfer tech, a lead guitarist, a high school math tutor, a textbook copyeditor, and a psychiatric nurse’s aide. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to hunker down and learn a bunch of stuff, and so I went back to school. In 2007 I picked up an MA in Psychology from the New School for Social Research, and spent a year as a research associate in Cognitive Neuroscience at New York University. In 2011 I received a PhD in Psychobiology from the University of California, Davis, which was supervised by Jeff Schank. Much as I had difficulty staying in one line of work before returning to academia, I have since had trouble staying in one discipline. From 2011 to 2014, I was a postdoc at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Advanced Modeling in the Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences, working with Joshua Epstein and an interdisciplinary team that included biologists, economists, demographers, engineers, and philosophers. From 2014 to 2015, I did a second postdoc in the department of Anthropology at UC Davis, working with Richard McElreath. I then moved a few hundred yards over for yet another postdoc, with a joint appointment in the departments of Political Science and Computer Science, working with Zeev Maoz and Raissa D’Souza. Finally, in 2016, I attained satori and departed the postdoc train to join the faculty at UC Merced in the department of Cognitive and Information Sciences. And nothing bad ever happened again.

You can download my full CV here.