Academic Credentials
  • Ph.D., Psychology, University of California, Davis, 2025
  • B.A., Psychology, University of California, Davis, 2020
Professional Honors
  • Recipient of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language 2024 Trainee Scholarship Award
Professional Affiliations
  • Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Member, 2025-Present
  • Society for the Neurobiology of Language, Member, 2022-Present

As part of Exponent's Human Factors team, Dr. Jahanfard applies her scientific expertise to help clients better understand how cognitive and linguistic factors influence user behavior, perception, and decision-making in real-world settings. Her background in experimental design and neurocognitive research enables her to analyze complex human-system interactions, identify usability risks, and support evidence-based evaluations of product warnings, instructions, and human performance across diverse populations. She also provides support to cases involving vehicles and slips, trips, and falls. 

Dr. Jahanfard is a cognitive psychologist, with expertise in bilingual language processing and comprehension. Her work bridges the fields of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psycholinguistics to explore the neurocognitive correlates of predictive processing in bi/multilingual language users. She leverages behavioral tools, electrophysiological methods (EEG/ERPs), and multivariate machine learning algorithms (SVM) to gain a comprehensive understanding of the effects of native/bilingual status on immediate language processing mechanisms. Her work has also explored the downstream consequence of language errors on memory to delineate the degree to which the bilingual experience affects cognitive processes beyond language. 

Dr. Jahanfard has over 7 years of research experience, from planning to publication. She has designed muti-method experiments, collected electrophysiological and neuroimaging (fMRI) data, and performed advanced statistical analysis and data visualization in MATLAB and RStudio. The culmination of these experiences has led to her presenting her work at national and international research conferences, including the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and the Society for the Neurobiology of Language.