MEET OUR TEAM
Laura Simone Lewis
Bio: Dr. Laura Simone Lewis is an incoming Assistant Professor in the departments of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara.
She earned her B.S. from Duke University, her PhD from Harvard University, and was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley.
Laura is fascinated by the evolution and development of social cognition in great apes, especially the mechanisms that we use to form, build, maintain, and repair long-term social relationships. Besides hanging out with great apes, Laura loves rock climbing, swimming in the ocean, making pottery, and backpacking in the mountains.
BOOM Lab Team
Dr. Lewis and BOOM Lab PhD student Amanda Goguen at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden
Amanda Goguen
Bio: Amanda is an incoming Ph.D. student in Psychological & Brain Sciences at UC Santa Barbara.
She holds a B.A. in Psychology from CU Denver. She previously worked in the Comparative Cognition Lab at UC San Diego, assisting in data collection and analysis for the Macaque and Canine Cognition projects. She has also collected data at Born Free USA (Texas), Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary (Kenya), and Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary (Uganda), gaining valuable field experience with primates.
Amanda is particularly interested in how theory of mind abilities and social relationships influence decision-making in cooperative and competitive contexts in chimpanzees, bonobos, and children. Additionally, she wants to explore how self-image and social reputation shape behaviors in social settings. In the future, she hopes to broaden her research to include comparative studies with non-primate animals. In her free time, she likes to play with her dogs, see friends, explore nature, and draw.