I'm an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and human-computer interaction. My research explores how people understand and respond to one another, combining behavioural, physiological, and cognitive measures.
My academic background spans psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and human-computer interaction. I've conducted research with interdisciplinary laboratories across New Zealand, Australia, and Europe, developing and evaluating immersive systems for studying empathy, embodiment, emotion, and interpersonal experience.
In July 2026, I completed my PhD at the University of Auckland. My PhD research explored how people can learn to respond to suffering with care rather than distress. The heart of this work was a quest to understand what changes in a person, as compassion is cultivated, that lets someone come closer to suffering while remaining calm, present and kind. I developed Equanimity VR, an immersive compassion meditation with breath-pacing cues to help guide slow breathing patterns and reduce physiological and emotional arousal following empathic distress. It is designed to help people regulate distress while staying emotionally engaged with another person’s suffering.
My work is rooted in psychology and inspired by Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenology, which seeks to bridge what we can measure in the brain and body with the lived structure of experience. I bring together physiological, neural, behavioural and first-person data to understand how mindfulness, emotion regulation and care unfold, moment to moment, as we witness someone else’s suffering. Immersive technologies are my research tools, and a way of helping people understand the intricacies of one another’s experience more richly.
Research Labs & Collaborations
Auckland Bioengineering Institute
Doctoral research in compassion meditation, empathic distress, psychophysiology, and immersive technologies.
IX Lab
Experimental research in multisensory perception, perceptual illusions, immersive environments, and psychotherapeutic environments in VR.
Multisensory Experience Lab
Embodied learning, multimodal interaction, and mixed-reality systems for creative skill acquisition.
RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion
Short-Term Scientific Mission investigating motion capture and musical gesture analysis.
Enactive Virtuality Lab
Enactive co-presence, virtual characters, empathy, and psychophysiological measurement.
Empathic Computing Lab
EEG, brain-computer interfaces, interpersonal synchrony, and physiologically responsive VR.
Social Cognition Lab
Social cue detection, gaze behaviour, and immersive simulations for autistic adults.
BeAnother Lab
Embodied perspective-taking, interpersonal understanding, and experimental evaluation of body-swap experiences.
Teaching Experience
I've taught undergraduate and postgraduate students across psychology, research methods, media design, and immersive technologies, including course instruction, guest lectures, student supervision, and examination.
Whitecliffe College
Finding My Way — academic and professional skills, scientific literacy, research ethics, and the ethics of artificial intelligence.
CIEE Auckland
Positive Psychology — undergraduate teaching, assessment design, and research supervision.
University of Auckland
Design and Autonomous Technologies, Design Futures, Prototyping, and Design Research Methodologies.
Technical University Dresden
Empirical Methods in Psychology, Introduction to Virtual Reality, and Introduction to Thesis Research.
Aalborg University Copenhagen
Sensation and Perception, Multimodal Perception in Media, and Real-Time Interfaces and Interactions.
Zürich University of the Arts
Augmented Reality Perspective-Taking Workshop in collaboration with BeAnother Lab.
Grants, Awards & Scholarships
University of Auckland Doctoral Scholarship
TEC Entrepreneurial Grant
NordForsk Short-Term Scientific Mission
Visiting Student Researcher Scholarship
Pre-PhD Student Researcher Travel Award
Mind & Life Institute Travel Scholarship
Hershey Scholarship
Education
PhD in Bioengineering
Co-supervised through the Department of Psychological Medicine.