My interdisciplinary program of research contributes to our understanding of how individuals learn and use political information. I use techniques from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to test theoretical propositions about political learning and decision-making that often cannot be adequately addressed using traditional survey and survey-experimental methods. By using these techniques, I have been able either to confirm tenuous survey results, challenge those results, or pose new questions. My work currently falls into three research categories: communicating prejudiced and stereotypic political information, remembering political information, and comprehending political information.

My interdisciplinary expertise is reflected in my publishing record, as my lead-authored papers have been published in flagship journals in three disciplines: communication (Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Human Communication Research), psychology (Psychological Science), and political science (American Journal of Political Science). I have also published in top subfield journals (Political Communication, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience).

My work has received recognition from leading professional organizations, including the Walter Lippmann Best Article of the Year Award from the American Political Science Association, and Top Paper Awards from the International Communication Association and National Communication Association. This program of work has offered a fruitful training ground for junior researchers, yielding nine co-authored journal publications for seven graduate students and two undergraduate students who I trained in my lab. I serve on the editorial boards at the Journal of Communication and Communication Research.

I was previously an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2012 to 2013, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, having received my Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Illinois in August 2012.