Officially a PhD in social psychology! 🎓🎉 It's been a wild ride: I started grad school as a new immigrant with a kid and graduated as a mom of four and CEO of @Besample_app Grateful to everyone who supported me on this journey, especially my incredible husband @Econ_AI

From rags to riches😂 A year ago, I had 0 peer-reviewed publications; today, I have two! 🎉 Jon Maner and I took a life history perspective on human reproductive pace, finding that mortality is its strongest predictor. Came out today in BMC Public Health!

Music to my ears... 🥰 (Joe is that very Harvard professor who introduced the term WEIRD back in 2010; his work inspired me to start Besample)

My 5th baby - Besample - is turning 1 y.o. today! 🎉🎂 We're at 250 researchers, 229 completed studies, 130,000 collected responses, 7 top-notch advisors, and 18 investors — it's been quite a ride, and it's only the beginning! Go Besample!🚀💘

My first peer-reviewed article was published today in Psychological Science! Using public data, we show that attitudes and laws about abortion around the world, as well as across 50 U.S. states and 3000+ counties, can be predicted from local mortality risk. Our explanation draws on evolutionary life history theory, suggesting that when mortality is high, it becomes adaptive for human groups to facilitate the "fast" life history mode, marked by more offspring and earlier reproduction. On the opposite, when risk of mortality is low, humans, just like other "slow" animals, can afford later and less abundant reproduction. The data we used here are correlational and cross-sectional, so we cannot really draw causal conclusions, only suggest them. I'm so grateful to my research advisor and co-author Jon Maner who wisely guided me through the review process, helped me use my strengths, was patient to my weaknesses, and eventually got me to have my first pub in a really, really good journal.

@n_chebotar Oh I'm so with you. It's also still a very inefficient market with poor targeting. I hope the product you're building will help make it a little better

This fall, my team and I went through two startup accelerator programs. We worked hard to get admitted to both demo days, and today, I'm pitching Besample at the demo day of @HiveFounders, a great UK program for female founders. Come listen to us, as well as some bright women building great products:

We've been shortlisted to pitch at @WebSummit in Lisbon! 😀🎉 Previously, @Besample_app had been selected as one of the startups in the Alpha track with an opportunity to attend the event and exhibit. But pitching is a new milestone: it's super competitive; less than 10% of the attending startups get this opportunity. There will be a dozen relevant investors listening to our 3-min pitch and smashing us afterward :) Wish us luck!

@Aaron_J_Moss I know, I'm shocked! and thanks!

I will forever cherish the fact that @Besample_app 's first ad with @SPSPnews was in a newsletter about psychopathic revenge 😎 Apply for a grant, BTW!

Here's some great news: we got accepted to a Berkeley-based startup accelerator known as @TheBatchery! The program starts today, and the whole @Besample_app team is excited about the upcoming 6 weeks alongside the smartest and most energetic mentors and founders from across the U.S. (and because of us, from across the world, too).

Unbelievable, but I got featured in @BusinessInsider today! As a Russian native, I shared five of my biggest culture shocks after moving to the U.S. five years ago.

Congratulate me on being featured in a small but influencial local newspaper

If you have a spare minute and you're on board with Besample's mission, please upvote us on Product Hunt!

I spent the past two weeks in Zambia, finding participants for my own research and for Besample. What can I say in one tweet... Africa is a different world. As behavioral scientists, we absolutely must include it in our research - if we want to study humans, not just Americans.

Check out Besample's first-ever product demo featuring a psychology researcher Connor (who happens to be our UX researcher, too), and our beautiful community outreach intern Bri. We made this video to apply to Y Combinator, but it never gets old!

What a weird grad student calendar, huh? I now devote 90% of my time to Besample: interviewing and helping researchers, planning marketing and fundraising, and looking for our future CTO. In the meantime, I do research... It's overwhelming. But it's exactly how I want it to be!

I presented at #MPA2023 today, and a guy asked a really good question about applying regression discontinuity to my mortality/abortion data... And that was how I finally met my namesake Mark Brandt @mjbsp that I'd heard so much about (usually preambled by 'Are you related to...')