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 endeavor.

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
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Master of Arts - Psychology (2025)
Conferred en route to PhD
Bachelor of Science - Computer Science (2020)
Psychology and Mathematics Minors		 University of Massachusetts Lowell
Kennedy College of Sciences

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

Drugs and Behavior
Graduate Teaching Fellow		 Spring 2025
CAS PS333, Boston University
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