You can reach me at either of the following addresses.

For academic and research matters:

    mpascale [AT] bu [DOT] edu

For all other personal and professional matters:

    mpascale [AT] psyc [DOT] dev

Michael P. Pascale

Cognitive Psychology | Data Science | Research Software

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Hello! I am a doctoral student in the Cognition and Decision Lab at Boston University.

My research is concerned with decision-making in the context of human information behavior, which I approach from the perspective of computational cognitive neuroscience. This primarily includes information seeking and exploration, two kinds of behavior which are influenced by curiosity, uncertainty, model-based learning, and valuation processes. On a broader scale, I am particularly interested how these aspects of individual psychology impact social epistemology and the acquisition of knowledge as a human social endeavour.

I also am an avid evangelist for the open source movement, contributing to Wikipedia and to software tools in the social sciences.

Education

Doctoral Student - Psychology (Current, Since 2023)
PhD Program in Brain, Behavior, and Cognition
Boston University

Bachelor of Science - Computer Science (2020)
Psychology and Mathematics Minors
University of Massachusetts Lowell

Previous Experience

Massachusetts General Hospital
Center For Addiction Medicine		 Programmer
March 2021 — July 2023
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Applied Cognition Lab		 Programmer
May 2020 — May 2021
University of New Hampshire
Affect, Cognition and Computation Lab		 Research Assistant
September 2020 — March 2021
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Applied Cognition Lab		 Research Assistant
January 2020 — May 2020
Teledyne Technologies Inc.
Teledyne DALSA		 Software Engineer Intern
June 2019 — September 2019

Teaching

Physiological Psychology
Graduate Teaching Fellow		 Fall 2024
CAS PS336, Boston University
Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
Graduate Teaching Fellow		 Spring 2024
CAS PS231, Boston University

Technical Skills

  • Computer Programming
    R, JavaScript, C, C++, Python

  • Data Wrangling
    Tidyverse, Excel, Pandas, SQL

  • Data Visualization
    ggplot2, Three.js

  • Development Environments
    Visual Studio Code, RStudio, Jupyter, MATLAB, JetBrains

  • Web Development
    HTML/CSS, Shiny, Django, Vue, PHP, Express

  • Electronic Data Collection
    REDCap, Qualtrics, PsychoPy, E-Prime