Born north of the Mason-Dixon line but raised in Alabama, Erin Robbins lacks the ice-fishing skills of her northern relatives and mint julep making skills of her southern kin. To compensate for this, she decided to start studying everything. As an undergraduate at Birmingham-Southern College, Erin earned degrees in philosophy and biology-psychology and was the recipient of two Vail fellowships. She served as copy editor for the philosophic journal Sartre Studies International, researched endangered plant communities as part of conservation efforts in collaboration with The Nature Conservancy, and won the Psi Chi Regional Award for psychological research at the 2006 MPA conference.
Erin spent the last year being a poor graduate student at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, where she earned an MSPH in Public Health Policy and collaborated on a policy project with NASA. At UAB, Erin became interested in questions about economic behavior, and she is continuing this line of thought as a graduate student at Emory.
At the Rochat lab, Erin plans on investigating moral development and economic behavior in children by studying sharing behavior, as well as cross-cultural influences and issues pertaining to theory of mind. This really means that Erin just sits in an office all day making balloon animals for children to play with and calling it science. In her next life Erin wants to be a photographer for National Geographic, but for now she is sublimely happy being a geek.