She obtained her BA from Willamette University in 2005 and her PhD from Northwestern University in 2010. After teaching for a couple of years at small liberal arts colleges, she went back for a post-doc. She completed her post-doc with Dr. Jon Gratch at ICT, and then stayed on at ICT as a senior research associate. She works in the areas of human-computer interaction, affective computing, and trust-in-automation. Her research focuses on rapport, disclosure, trust, persuasion, and negotiation with virtual agents and social robots.