About Me

I am a cultural psychologist, and lecturer in psychology of social media at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. My research uses computational methods to examine the emergence of online culture in social media and video games, and their effects on mental health and wellbeing in users. I also do research on how chatbots can be used to support mental health, and my previous work examined how culture influences music preferences.

I received my PhD in Cognitive and Behavioral Science from Kyoto University in 2021, as a research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. My dissertation, on applying computational methods to cultural psychology, was awarded the Harry and Pola Triandis Dissertation Award by the International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology in 2022. My research has been funded by Google AI, SSRC, and JSPS. I was previously an assistant professor at the Social Computing Laboratory at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan.