I graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Cognitive Science and Psychology. During my time there, I collaborated with Don Moore, who advised my undergraduate thesis on intellectual humility and overconfidence. I also worked in the Gopnik Lab on projects examining metaphor comprehension in children, and the use of functional metaphors in pedagogy. I am interested in how people flexibly represent the world around them, depending on their present goals and situational constraints. This question concerns both causal reasoning and categorization, as the categories we form correspond to the causes and effects of relevant outcomes. I am particularly interested in how abstract concepts are utilized, at times even generated on the fly, in order to isolate features of objects useful for problem solving. To study these questions I use behavioral experiments and computational modeling, with the goal of understanding how these processes are implemented in bot humans and artificial intelligence.