Sami began his career at Emory University, where he received a B.A. in Psychology. After graduating, he went on to pursue a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology at Yale University, where he worked on a broad range of topics with Frank  Keil,  Dick Aslin, Josh Knobe, and Sam McDougle. After defending his dissertation in March of 2022, he became a MindCORE Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where he collaborated with Liz Brannon, Anna Papafragou, and Russell Epstein. He spent two years in that position before opening his lab. Sami is interested in understanding how the mind works, broadly construed. Much of his work focuses on spatial cognition and specific instances of visual perception as 'case studies' of more general problems of mental representation.