About Me

I am a postdoctoral associate at New York University working with Dr. Marjorie Rhodes. During my doctoral training, I developed The Child Social Network Questionnaire, which is a method that can be used to capture and describe infants’ and young children’s early social networks. I argue that social networks are an excellent method to capture and describe children’s early social experience and developmental psychologists can harness the power of Social Network Analysis to generate questions about how early social experience relates to social cognitive development.

Feel free to contact me at nburke@nyu.edu or click here to learn more about my research.

Follow me on Twitter! I tweet about R, Network Science, current events, and my favorite writing companion - my 12-year-old senior pup!

Background

I graduated with a B.A. in Psychology and Cognitive Science from Northwestern University in 2015. As an undergraduate, I worked with Dr. Sandra Waxman and Dr. Amy Booth, and Dr. Frank Keil at Yale University studying word learning, language development, children’s causal reasoning, and adult’s reasoning about explanatory depth. I graduated with my PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Chicago in 2021. My dissertation committee was Dr. Amanda Woodward (chair), Dr. Susan Goldin-Meadow, and Dr. Alex Shaw.

I am a first-generation college student, which means my parents do not have a bachelor’s degree. I have served as a formal and informal mentor to fellow first-generation students throughout graduate school and in my postdoctoral training. Advocating for first-generation students is an important part of my research, mentoring, and pedagogy.

Interests beyond science

Long distance runner, marathoner, R-ladies Chicago, #firstgen, rescue dog mom