Joseph Heffner, PhD, is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at Stanford University. He leads the Emotions, Computation, and Choice (ECC) Lab, which studies the computational and neural basis of emotion, decision-making, and social cognition. His work combines behavioral experiments, smartphone platforms, EEG and fMRI, and computational modeling to understand how emotions shape cognition, from interpersonal punishment and forgiveness to dynamics in human-AI conversations. He received his PhD from Brown University and completed postdoctoral training at Yale University.