Here, we share and celebrate our team's efforts and accomplishments.
MAY 2025
Anushka and Brandon had a commentary accepted in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Anushka gave a talk at the California Workshop on Evolutionary Social Science!
Amelia gave a talk at URCA Week! Joy and Amelia also presented posters at URCA week.
At the meeting for the Society for Research in Child Development, Haowei and Mia (lab affiliates) gave poster presentations on work that they've been doing with Brandon, and Brandon gave a talk on close relationships and mental state reasoning.
Our team started testing children and doing outreach at the Santa Barbara Zoo!
Anushka and Brandon spoke with families and educators about social cognitive development at MOXI, a local science museum, for the opening of a new early childhood exhibit.
APRIL 2025
Congratulations to Anushka, who had a poster accepted for presentation at the annual meeting for the Cognitive Science Society, and for having a paper accepted in the conference proceedings! Brandon also had a poster accepted for presentation, with a paper accepted in the proceedings.
Congratulations to Amelia for getting into the UC LEADS program! This program will provide Amelia with a stipend to work with our lab this summer, a stipend to work with another UC lab next summer, and with professional development opportunities.
Congratulations to Anushka for also having a talk accepted at the California Workshop on Evolutionary Social Science!
Amelia and Joy submitted an abstract to present their URCA-funded work at URCA Week! They both had their posters accepted for presentation at URCA week! And a second congratulations to Amelia for also getting an oral presentation accepted for presentation at URCA week!
Our team (co-leads: Dana, Destiny, and Vanessa) started doing community outreach at the LEAP Children's Center, working with children and educators.
We welcomed two new undergraduate research assistants: Sydney Kauff and Zoe Gipson.
Brandon spoke with first-generation and transfer students at a professor lunch hour event, co-hosted by the ONDAS Center, the Transfer Student Center, and A-CAUSE.
Brandon gave a talk as part of the UCSB Prof Slam event, sharing our lab's research with alumni and the public.
MARCH 2025
Emma Yu accepted an offer to join our team as a PhD student, and she was awarded a Chancellor's Fellowship!
Anushka gave a data blitz on our lab's research at the Shared Reality Virtual Conference!
Brandon, Anushka, Amelia, and Carly submitted our lab's first paper to a journal! This paper is a perspective piece, relevant to phenomena that Anushka, Amelia, and Carly are studying in the lab.
We had end-of-quarter presentations from our first-quarter research assistants (Dana, Destiny, and Vanessa), and from Joy and Amelia, who are considering pursuing honors theses.
FEBRUARY 2025
Anushka submitted a paper to present our research at CogSci 2025, and the lab submitted its first grant!
Our lab had its first presentation accepted (a data blitz) for the Shared Reality Virtual Conference. Anushka will be presenting our research on perspective-taking in social interaction.
Joy, Amelia, and Raissa led lab meeting for the first time, sharing pilot data and discussing next steps.
Anushka and Brandon presented the team's research to the developmental studies group meeting.
Brandon spoke to first-generation students at the ONDAS Center about getting involved in research, highlighting the work of the first-generation college students in our lab, and to the Society for Undergraduate Psychologists about his journey in science and our lab's research.
We got IRB approval to conduct studies in preschools! Thanks to Mia for supporting the literature search, and to Vanessa for helping to translate documents into Spanish.
JANUARY 2025
Our team grew, with four new undergraduate research assistants: Dana Beas Alvarado, Destiny Laina, Jennifer Li, and Vanessa Rico.
DECEMBER 2024
Amelia and Joy won funding from URCA to support their research in the lab! Congratulations!
NOVEMBER 2024
The lab held its first Labapalooza event, where we learned about Halloween costumes, gardening, plays, music across cultures, and more!
All of our undergraduate research assistants gave an end-of-quarter presentation on the research that they'd contributed to this quarter.
Mia and Brandon visited the LEAP Children's Center, where we spoke with preschoolers and educators about science.
Brandon spoke to students in the Promise Scholars Program about navigating UCSB as a first-generation college student.
Anushka and Brandon gave talks to the social psychology area.
OCTOBER 2024
Anushka finished data collection on our lab's first experiment, and she gave a talk on this research to the developmental studies group meeting.
Anushka represented the UCSB Developmental Studies Group at the Santa Barbara Community Baby Shower.
SEPTEMBER 2024
Our team welcomed our first undergraduate research assistants: Amelia Chen, Raissa Cheng, Brooke Johannessen, Mia Solomon, Joy Sun, and Carly Wolf.
Anushka and Brandon spoke with new undergraduate students about research at the First-Gen and Transfer Scholars Welcome Event.
AUGUST 2024
We got IRB approval, and our team tested our first participant.
JULY 2024
The team begins! Our first members include Anushka Laha and Brandon Woo.
The UCSB Office of Admissions interviewed Brandon; see the video here.
Email | folk@psych.ucsb.edu
Bluesky | @brandonmwoo
If you're interested in joining as a grad student or a postdoc, you can find out more here.