Wasita Mahaphanit is a postdoctoral fellow jointly advised by Shawn Rhoads (ISMMS) and Mark Ho (NYU). Her research examines how people infer what another person’s mind is like from conversation, and how these inferences give rise to social connection. In her doctoral work, she studied how people evaluate what is shared between minds and which discoveries about another’s inner world most strongly predict connection. She is now extending this work to how people construct and act on models of other minds during joint planning and coordination, and what happens when this process breaks down. She combines custom multiplayer web experiments, natural language processing, and computational cognitive modeling in her work. Wasita received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from Dartmouth College, where she was co-advised by Luke Chang and Robert Hawkins (Stanford University), and her B.S. from Brown University where she was advised by Amitai Shenhav. Before graduate school, she was the lab manager of Michael J. Frank’s at Brown. Outside of the lab, she plays video games and practices aerial hoop.