Evan L
- Research Program Mentor

PhD at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB)

Expertise

psychology, neuroscience

Bio

I received my Ph.D. in the Psychological and Brain Sciences program at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). I currently work as a postdoctoral fellow in conjunction with USCB and the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. My fascination for the brain runs deep, and there is still so much we don't understand about it. Every action and thought that you've ever experienced ultimately resulted from biological, chemical, and electrical processes from our brain and body. The goal of my research is to understand how these neurobiological mechanisms ultimately lead to our everyday experiences. My current research focuses on memory and decision-making, but I have worked with clinical populations, such as schizophrenia, in the past. My goal as a mentor is to inspire students to pursue projects aimed at understanding psychological and/or neurological processes with the hope that someone I mentor will one day pursue a career focused on researching the mind and brain. On a personal level, I enjoying playing video games on my virtual reality headset (I am a huge proponent of technology and integrating it into our lives). However, I also appreciate the outdoors and enjoy skating, surfing, going on hikes, and traveling the world.

Project ideas

Project ideas are meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.

Individual differences in decision-making during uncertainty

We make so many decisions everyday, and almost every decision will carry some degree of uncertainty. Past research has heavily focused on studying decision-making behavior by examining group averages (which assumes that all people generally adopt similar decision strategies). However, there has been a recent shift towards understanding individual differences, which better appreciates the fact that people may employ decision-making strategies that are fundamentally different from other people's strategies. This project aims at understanding people's unique decision-making strategies when people have uncertainty about which decision will result in the best outcome.