I study why performance degrades under pressure: whether the cost shows up in the quality of sensory evidence, in the threshold for acting on it, or elsewhere in the chain. My research uses psychophysics and computational modeling to pull apart dual-task costs in aging, where physical effort, arousal, and perception interact in ways that matter for applied human factors.

The central tool is a handgrip dual-task paradigm—concurrent isometric grip with auditory and visual discrimination tasks—combined with pupillometry and hierarchical Bayesian drift-diffusion modeling. Rather than reporting a single performance score, I model where in the decision process costs appear. That matters if you want to design systems that respond to cognitive state, not just average accuracy.

PhD 2026 (Expected), UC Riverside
Los Angeles / Riverside, CA — Open to Relocation
Human Factors · Quant UXR · Research Scientist (XR)
English (Professional) · Persian (Native) · French (Basic)

Education

Neurotree profile (academic genealogy)

PhD in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience

University of California, Riverside

2021 — 2026 (Expected)

M.Sc. in Psychology

Queen’s University

2017 — 2020

Hon. B.Sc. in Biological Sciences & Psychology

York University

2013 — 2017

Research & Industry Experience

Research Assistant I

Surgical Safety Technologies

Toronto, ON — 2021

  • Assisted on instance segmentation pipelines for surgical tool detection and tracking
  • Computed inter-rater reliability (κ and ICC) for ML annotation quality across analyst teams
  • Reviewed ML-for-surgical-safety literature to support internal research operations
  • Learned that alert fatigue and interface friction—not raw model accuracy—are what sink adoption of ML tools in clinical settings

XR Interaction Research — Independent Study

Self-directed Research

2025–2026

  • Built a fully remote web-based interaction testbed using React and TypeScript
  • Conducted a within-subject hand vs. gaze pointing study with ISO 9241-9 / Fitts’ law design
  • Published findings as arXiv preprint (arXiv:2603.15991)
  • Applied hierarchical Bayesian LBA in PyMC for verification-phase response time modeling

Surgeon Cognitive Dashboard — R&D Project

Self-directed Research

2025

  • Designed and deployed a real-time R Shiny dashboard for surgical trainee cognitive monitoring
  • Integrated XGBoost multiclass classifier with Platt scaling for cognitive state prediction
  • Built three instructional threshold policies for training contexts (Adaptive Gain, SDT, Fatigue-Adaptive)
  • Live demo at: shinyapps.io
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