Hector received a B.S. in Cognitive Psychology from Arizona State University in 2021. His undergraduate research work focused on how humans integrate cross-modal bodily cues to embody and interact with virtual avatars.

After a short stint as a Study Manager in clinical neurology trials in Boston, Hector joined Brown University’s Virtual Environment Navigation Lab as lab manager in 2022. There, his work centered on developing Virtual Reality experiments and computer vision pipelines to model leadership networks in human crowd behavior.

As a PhD candidate in the Psychedelic Research group at PUK, Hector is investigating how psychedelics can be used to modulate the embodiment of, and identification with, virtual avatars—and how this modified self-representation might be leveraged to treat specific pain pathologies.