I completed all my university degrees at Babeș-Bolyai University (Cluj-Napoca, Romania). After a postdoctoral period, I spent five years as a Lecturer at Lancaster University, and in October 2017 I joined the University of York as Lecturer in Developmental Psychology. In 2020, I became Senior Lecturer.

My research programme explores how infants learn about people — how they perceive, interpret, and respond to others’ emotions, actions, and intentions in both controlled and naturalistic contexts. By combining behavioural, eye-tracking, psychophysiological, and real-world wearable-sensor methods, my lab aims to understand how early perceptual, affective, and motor systems support the development of social understanding and prosocial behaviour.

Social and Emotional Development Lab webpage

Research Topics

• Learning about people through emotion and action — examining how infants perceive and integrate visual, auditory, and bodily cues to form coherent representations of others’ emotions and goal-directed actions.

• Real-world social learning — analysing multimodal data (from synchronized head-mounted cameras and body-worn physiology sensors) to understand how infants attend to and learn from emotional and social cues in everyday interactions.

• Method development for naturalistic developmental science — designing and validating tools for capturing and interpreting real-world infant experiences, including the EgoActive wearable system (synchronized head-mounted and body sensors), the Automatic Sustained Attention Prediction (ASAP) method, and an open-source ECG pipeline for large scale infant physiological signal processing.

• Modeling dynamic social interactions — developing data-driven and dynamic approaches to describe how emotional expressions, physiological responses, attention, and movement unfold and influence one another over time.

• Developmental and translational aims — identifying mechanisms and early markers of adaptive and atypical socio-emotional functioning to inform early detection and intervention strategies.

Current and Recent Projects

• How the natural statistics of infants’ real-world environments shape the development of brain networks for social executive functions (Funded by Wellcome Leap - 1kD Program, PI)

• Infant neural and physiological responses to fear expressions as risk markers for the development of conduct disorders (funded by Wellcome Trust, PI)

• Technologies for studying human development in the ‘wild’ (funded by EPSRC IAA, PI)

Methods and Approach

We use multiple methods to disentangle the complexity of how infants learn about people. Our work integrates behavioural observation, eye-tracking, neuroimaging, psychophysiology, and wearable technologies to capture both the richness of infants’ real-world experiences and the precision of laboratory paradigms. Using the EgoActive system — which synchronizes infants’ head-mounted cameras and body sensors — we collect multimodal, first-person data on infants’ everyday social interactions, including continuous egocentric audio-video and physiological recordings. The ultimate goal is to integrate real-world and lab-based methods to build a comprehensive understanding of how infants perceive, interpret, and learn from the people around them.

Aim and Impact

By integrating laboratory and real-world approaches, my research seeks to build a comprehensive model of how infants learn about people — how early perceptual and affective systems develop into the foundations of empathy, communication, and prosocial behaviour. This work also aims to inform early identification and intervention strategies for atypical social development.