I work on how people learn, and how to teach it better

I am a PhD candidate in the economics of education at Monash University, under the supervision of Dr. Mallory Avery. My research asks a simple question with hard answers. When students learn with new technology, does it help them, and how would we know?

To answer it I run causal experiments, in real classrooms and in the lab. The work sits at the point where economics, education, and AI meet, which is also where a lot of confident claims go untested.

When I was young, school did not come easily to me. In my early years I was near the bottom of the class, and for a long time I assumed that was simply who I was. Some of it was life at home, some of it was never really being shown how to study. Either way, the lesson I picked up was that some people are clever and some are not, and that I belonged in the second group.

That turned out to be wrong, though it took me years to see it. The gap was never really about how smart I was. It was about method. Once I started working in a steady, consistent way, and let myself believe that getting better was even possible, things began to move. The same student who had been behind could catch up, and then go further than anyone expected.

That is why I do what I do. I think most people are carrying far more ability than they were ever told. The willpower has to be theirs, but the part that usually goes missing, a clear way to learn that makes the effort add up, is something that can be taught. Giving people that is the point of my teaching, my research, and everything I build here.