Samantha is a first-year PhD student in the Cognitive Science program at UCSD, working with Dr. Federico Rossano. Her research aims to assess the extent to which certain social cognitive abilities have been conserved or have evolved convergently across human, primate, and canine taxa. She completed her undergraduate studies at Duke University in evolutionary anthropology and biology, conducting research on the ontogeny and scope of canine cognition with Dr. Brian Hare and collaborating on studies of lemur behavior at the Duke Lemur Center.