Becky Gilbert

I’m a software developer on the Lookit team who specializes in creating the software and systems used to run behavioral experiments online. Lookit is a website run by the ECCL that allows families to participate in cognitive developmental experiments from home. My work on the team involves adding new features, testing, debugging, improving documentation, and offering technical support.

I discovered my passion for research software development fairly recently during my career journey. I have a background in experimental psychology and completed a PhD at the University of York UK, which focused on short-term memory for the timing and order of spoken words. I then worked as a post-doctoral researcher at UCL in London UK where I investigated the interpretation of words with multiple meanings (e.g., “bark”, “bat”). Prior to joining MIT, I was at the MRC CBU in Cambridge UK where I worked as a web developer and post-doctoral researcher investigating speech perception and comprehension. During this time, I also became a maintainer for jsPsych, which is a free and open-source JavaScript library for running web-based experiments.

I’m grateful to have found a software position that allows me to contribute (very tangentially!) to experimental psychology research, and that shares my values around open-source software and open science. I’m especially interested in improving the accuracy and reliability of web-based methods, and broadening its scope to include the sort of data that previously could only be collected in a lab setting.