About

Hello! I’m Alicia, a full-time RA and joint lab manager at the University of Chicago, where I also earned my BA in Philsophy, BS in Computer Science, and MA in Pschology. I’m fortunate to be advised by Prof. Yuan Chang Leong and Prof. Xuechunzi Bai.

Currently, I resesarch how people build structured expectations and models of the world from experience (e.g. event schemas), how these models & memories are selectively and idiosyncratically activated when processing new information, and how biased models can be updated through new experiences. I use multivariate neuroimaging (fMRI), behavioral tasks & eye-tracking, LLMs, and large-scale online tasks to study these questions.

In the future, I plan for my research to center on the interactions of episodic and semantic memory systems. When is abstract knowledge versus episodic details retrieved? How are representations compositionally recombined in novel contexts? How are memory representations transformed or forgotten in relation to changing task demands? I hope to develop computational instantiations of theoretical frameworks to test and explain how they support learning, reasoning, and abstraction in naturalistic contexts, with applications to both biological and artificial intelligence systems.

More about me

I believe understanding memory systems is fundamental to explaining the flexibility of human intelligence. Beyond that, (episodic) memory is also interesting to me in a different way: it comprises our identity as individuals; the ‘self’ is a bundle of episodic memories. Thus I feel very lucky to be able to study processes like event segmentation that may form the very building blocks of who we are - “the meaningful segments of one’s life, the coherent units of one’s personal history” (Beal and Weiss, 2013). Before going to the empirical side, I also approached these questions as a philosopher, where I was interested in self-creation and personhood/moral patienthood.

News

• Jan, 2026 - first-author project with Prof. Bai and Prof. Lee accepted to ACM SIGCHI 2026 (see you in Barcelona!)
• Jan, 2026 - (first) first-author project with Prof. Leong is available on bioRxiv!
• July 2025 - started as a joint lab manager for Prof. Leong and Prof. Bai 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 neuro conference with a poster presentation at Social & Affective Neuroscience Society! (Abstract Book)[https://socialaffectiveneuro.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/SANS-Conference-2025_Abstract-Book_July-29-1.pdf]
• 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