I go by Miao, pronounced "Mee-Aw". My last name pronounced like "Chien".

I am currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Inequality in America Initiative at Harvard University. I received my Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology and Education from the University of Toronto, Canada. 

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I am interested in child social cognition, to answer the questions about how children acquire knowledge of social categories, such as race and gender, and how they use the knowledge to perceive, evaluate, and judge others. I have two lines of research: (1) the origin of implicit social attitudes and the social-cognitive factors that drive its development; (2) the malleability of implicit racial biases and interventions to reduce them in childhood.

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I use various methodologies and theories from cognitive, social-cognitive, and developmental psychology. I developed a novel child-friendly Implicit Bias Test to measure children's implicit racial bias and an innovative training program, referred to as individuation training, to reduce children’s racial bias.