Welcome to Sustained Attention

I'm Shawn — software engineer turned computational neuroscientist turned data scientist. I started writing code at 12, shipped iOS apps through high school, and somehow ended up studying how the brain guides our learning and attention for my PhD at Stanford.

These days I work across both worlds. At Slack, I built ML systems for end user archetypes and data pipelines that process millions of data points. In the lab, I run experiments measuring pupil dilation and brain activity to understand why we remember some things and forget others. Along the way, I've published research in journals like Current Directions in Psychological Science, and built and shipped production-grade open-source tools like eyeris — an opinonated pupillometry preprocessing R package now used by many researchers across the globe.

This blog is where those threads converge. Expect posts on:

• Signal processing — the neural kind (EEG, pupillometry) and the data engineering kind (streaming, pipelines)
• Building research tools — API design, reproducibility, and making software that scientists actually want to use
• Attention and memory — what cognitive neuroscience tells us about focus, distraction, and learning

I'm kicking things off with two pieces:

• Attending to Remember — how the quality of your attention — down to the millisecond — influences whether and how you'll remember
• Engineering a High-Performance, Opinionated Pupillometry Preprocessing Framework in R — 3,500+ Downloads Later: The Engineering Behind eyeris

If you're interested in brains, data, or building things that work with human cognition instead of against it — stick around. You can also find these posts on dev.to, Medium, and my Substack, Sustained Attention.

– Shawn