I am an Assistant Professor in the Program of Color Science & Munsell Color Science Laboratory at Rochester Institute of Technology, and head of the Faces, Avatars, & Robots Lab (FAR Lab).  

 

Our research explores how vision and cognition work to perceive and process human faces, which transmit myriad information that regulates social interactions. I am particularly interested in the visual and social information that is conveyed through changes in facial color appearance. 

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Some primary goals of this research are to understand how the visual system perceives even subtle variations in face and skin color (e.g., visual detection & discrimination), and how facial color can influence judgments about the person (e.g., physiological and psychological states, traits, emotion, behavior, preference). 

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This research focuses not only on real human faces, but also includes artificial social agents (e.g., social robots, avatars, emojis), as well as perceiving people within emerging technologies such as virtual and augmented reality environments.

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I am also broadly interested in color-emotion associations, measurement of skin color, appearance of skin tones in art, color in extended reality, and color in data visualizations.