About

I’m an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Southern California. Previously, I worked as a research scholar with Uri Hasson and Ken Norman at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. I completed my PhD with Jim Haxby at Dartmouth College.

The core questions driving my research are “What is shared between individual brains?” and “How do we share our thoughts with one another?”—using language and other coordinated actions. My research combines naturalistic neuroimaging paradigms (fMRI, ECoG) and deep neural networks to better answer these questions in real-world contexts. In current work, we’re leveraging large language models to better understand how humans use language to transmit complex thoughts from one brain to another.

I’ll be recruiting PhD students at USC this year to start in Fall 2026!

Recent work

For an example of our recent work, check out this project led by Zaid Zada now published in Neuron: link. We use embeddings from a large language model to track the flow of linguistic information from one brain to another in face-to-face conversations between pairs of ECoG patients.

^{Zada, Z., Goldstein, A. Y., Michelmann, S., Simony, E., Price, A., Hasenfratz, L., Barham, E., Zadbood, A., Doyle, W., Friedman, D., Dugan, P., Melloni, L., Devore, S., Flinker, A., Devinsky, O., Hasson, U.*, & Nastase, S. A.* (2024). A shared model-based linguistic space for transmitting our thoughts from brain to brain in natural conversations. Neuron, 112(18), 3211–3222. DOI PDF}