About

Hello! I’m Alicia, a full-time research assistant and joint lab manager for Yuan Chang Leong and Xuechunzi Bai at the University of Chicago.

I’m interested in how people build structured expectations and models of the world from experience, how these models & memories are selectively and idiosyncratically activated when processing new information, and how harmful models can be updated through new experiences. I use naturalistic brain imaging (fMRI), behaviorial tasks & eye-tracking, LLMs, and computational modelling to study these questions.

News

• July 2025 - Started as a joint lab manager for Bai Lab and Leong Lab at UChicago!
• July 14, 2025 - I now have a non-zero h-index 🎉 (i.e. I have 1 citation)
• June 2025 - Graduated with a M.A. in Psychology from UChicago
• May 2025 - Submitted my M.A thesis: Anxiety is associated with idiosyncratic neural event boundaries during naturalistic perception Abstract
• April 2025 - Attended my first ever neuroscience conference with a poster presentation at Social & Affective Neuroscience Society!
• June 2024 - Graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science (Specialization in Machine Learning) and a B.A. in Philosophy from UChicago
• May 2023 - The start of my research career as a summer intern at the Computational Affective and Social Neuroscience Laboratory