The easiest way to get in touch with me is via email: kco.gr@dartmouth.edu and the easiest place to see my papers is Google Scholar 😊
Where I went to school
- Dartmouth College | PhD Candidate in Psychological and Brain Sciences (2021-)
- University of Oxford | MSc by Research in Experimental Psychology (2019-2021)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology | B.S. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences; Minor in Computer Science (2015-2019)
Some non-academic jobs I’ve had
Digital Impact Researcher | Catalyst of San Diego and Imperial Counties (Mar - Dec 2024)
Conducted 10-week longitudinal study measuring community sentiment transformation on NextDoor as lived-experience advocates engaged neighborhoods in housing policy dialogues.
AI Consultant | Sean Michaels (2021-2023)
Engineered a custom poetry-generation AI by curating a weighted training corpus from poets.org using network analysis, fine-tuning GPT-2, and developing a Streamlit interface for collaborative human-AI poetry composition. This bot was used for the novel Do You Remember Being Born?
Curriculum Developer | Inspirit AI (2020-2022)
- Designed and taught a 10-week intensive experiential learning curriculum that introduced high school students to AI ethics issues via coding projects.
- Designed and taught a 5-week project for advanced students focused on building pose-estimation models for NASA astronauts.
Data Engineering Intern | Factual Inc (Summer 2018)
Developed methods for automating location data source quality evaluation in order to determine how trustworthy particular sources were for particular location attributes, like geocode and building name. This updated procedure improved overall accuracy in key datasets by 2-5%.
Talks I’ve given
Conference Talks
- Pink noise in speakers' semantic synchrony dynamics as a metric of conversation quality @ CogSci 2024
- Pink noise in speakers' semantic synchrony dynamics as a metric of conversation quality @ Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (CCN) 2024
- Science fiction and folk knowledge of the brain: insights for science communicators @ Neuromatch Conference 2020
Invited Lab Meetings
- Beyond Synchrony: Measuring mutual adaptation in conversation with pink noise. Talk presented at: Helion Lab at Temple University; May 2, 2024
- Merely Players: Ambiguous theatrical scripts for idiosyncratic social inference. Talk presented at: Thomas Lab at Harvard; November 26, 2023
- Negation as a bid for theory-like mentalizing. Talk presented at: Saxelab Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at MIT; November 23, 2023
- Foraging for fairness: modeling social partner choice with optimal foraging theory. Talk presented at: Saxelab Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at MIT; June 12, 2020
Guest Lectures
- Fiction as inverse theory of mind. Guest lecture for COLT 35.05 Stories on my Mind: Cognitive Approaches to the Novel; 2024 February 16
- Convolutional Neural Networks. Guest lecture for PSYC 40: Computational Neuroscience; 2023 November
- Disnarration: Para-counterfactual reasoning in narrative comprehension. Guest lecture for COLT 35.05 Stories on my Mind: Cognitive Approaches to the Novel; 2023 May 12
- Hopfield Networks. Guest lecture for PSYC 40: Computational Neuroscience; 2022 October
Internal Brown Bags
- Complex mutual adaptation in conversation predicts enjoyment and connection. Talk presented at: Dartmouth Social Area Meeting (SLAB); 2024 Oct 24.
- Disnarration, or, efficient learning from paths not taken. Talk presented at: Dartmouth Social Area Meeting (SLAB); 2023 Oct 27.
- Merely Players: Ambiguous theatrical scripts for idiosyncratic social inference. Talk presented at: Dartmouth Social Area Meeting (SLAB); 2023 Feb 23.
Posters
- O’Nell, K., Templeton, E., Sanchez, K., Wheatley, T., Phillips, J., Finn, E.S. (2025). Negation as a tool for conveying mental models. Poster presented at Cog Sci; 2025 July 30-Aug 2; San Francisco, California.
- O’Nell, K., Finn, E.S. (2023). Normative interpretations of ambiguous social interactions. Poster presented at Society for Philosophy and Psychology; 2023 June 21-23; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
- O'Nell K., Saxe R., Anzellotti S. (2019). Deep networks trained to recognize facial expressions spontaneously develop representations of face identity. Poster presented at: Vision Sciences Society; 2019 May 17-22; St. Pete Beach, Florida.
Outreach Talks
- Facial recognition: humans versus computers. Talk presented at: Inspirit AI Healthcare Spotlight; 2022 September 23.
- Computational Models of Mind and Brain. Talk presented at: GE Girls Tech Talk; 2022 June 21.
- “Steady as she knows: invariant representations of emotion and identity" AI Meets Neuroscience, Cambridge Science Festival. April 2019
Things I’ve won
- Grants
- JustX Grant (Wright Center for the Study of Computation and Just Communities) | Don't Fence Me in: Defensive Storytelling to Subvert Partisan Stereotypes Encoded in Networked Knowledge Structures | Co-PI | Awarded $20,000
- Hopkins Center Arts Integration Grant | Merely Players: Theatrical Open Scene Performance as a Model for Real-World Social Disambiguation | Co-PI | Awarded $20,000
- Awards
- Marie A. Center 1982 Award for Excellence in Teaching | 2025
- Dartmouth 3 Minute Thesis Competition: 2nd Place | 2025
- Dartmouth Outstanding Graduate Teacher | 2023, 2025
- Marshall Scholar | 2019
- Josephine DeKarman Fellow | 2019