My most recent article was just featured in an episode of the Excited Utterance podcast hosted by the amazing Alex Nunn and Ed Cheng! It was truly an honor (and fun) to be a guest and talk about my research. Give it a listen on your next run or commute! 

I employ empirical and scientific methods to bring novel insight to legal questions. My research focuses on questions from the evidence, criminal law, and criminal procedure fields. A trained neuroscientist, I apply a combination of original experiments with neuroimaging and behavioral measures, theoretical data models, data analysis, analysis of the existing scientific literature, and more traditional doctrinal and descriptive methods to traditional legal questions. By applying these untraditional legal tools to traditional legal questions, my scholarship provides a unique perspective that promotes a greater understanding and legal reform.

My research agenda revolves around three primary questions: 1) What can neuroscience tell us about the accuracy of the psychological assumptions embedded in the Rules of Evidence and how they should be amended?; 2) How does our growing understanding of the cognitive realities of both criminal offenders and legal decision makers align with how substantive criminal law is currently structured and conceived?; and 3) What can neuroscience tell us about our criminal procedure practices in policing, at trial, and in sentencing? While the answers to these questions directly relate to evidence, criminal, and criminal procedure law, they also hold important implications for other legal fields such as mental-health and juvenile law.

My scholarship has been published in law reviews, scientific journals, and magazines for legal practitioners. It has also been cited by the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, been featured in legal blogs such as SCOTUS Blog, Courts Law Essay, Prawfsblog, Religion Clause, Neuroethics & Law Blog, and CrimProf Blog, and in general publications such as GQ.

Featured Publications:

• The Neuroscience of Evidentiary Rules: The Case of the Present Sense Impression, under submission (2024).
• Does Lying Require More or Les Working Memory than Truth Telling?, under submission at Psych. Sci. (2024).
• The Right to Personality: Navigating the Brave New World of Personality-Altering Interventions, 55 Conn. L. Rev. 564 (2023).
• Term Limits and Turmoil: Roe v. Wade’s Whiplash, 98 Tex. L. Rev. 121 (2019) (with Suzanna Sherry).
• Electrophysiological and Behavioral Evidence for Attentional Up-Regulation, but Not Down-Regulation, When Encoding Pictures into Long-term Memory, 47 Memory & Cognition 351 (2019) (with Geoffrey F. Woodman & Keisuke Fukuda).
• Neuroscience in the Law, 11 The SciTech Lawyer 4 (2015 (with Owen Jones).

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