Background
Katie is a doctoral student in Developmental Psychology working with Alex Shaw. She graduated from Wesleyan University in 2020 with a B.A. in Psychology. During her undergraduate studies, Katie began researching child development in the Wesleyan University Cognitive Development Lab. Katie also completed her honors thesis in the Wesleyan University Psychometric Lab in which she investigated how self-presentation and wealth inequality influence adults’ generosity. After graduating, Katie worked as Yarrow Dunham’s and Paul Bloom’s laboratory manager at the Yale University Social Cognitive Development and Mind and Development Labs. With Dr. Dunham, she researched children’s early understandings of gender-neutral pronouns and intuitions about trade. With Dr. Bloom, she researched why children and adults think lying is immoral and what types of lies are morally permissible.
Research Interests
Katie broadly researches children's social and moral development. She studies what children believe is moral and is also interested in researching how children behave in socio-moral dilemmas. At the University of Chicago, Katie plans to focus on how children both think about and engage in reputation management through lying and behavioral change with different types of audiences.
Background
Pınar is a doctoral student in the Integrative Neuroscience program working with Jai Yu. She received her BA in Psychology from Boğaziçi University and her MA in Cognitive Psychology from Koç University. During her master’s, she worked with Prof. Fuat Balcı in the Timing and Decision Making Laboratory and studied the time- and number-based decision making in mice using behavioral paradigms and optogenetic stimulation.
Research Interests
Pınar’s current research interests are the neurophysiological mechanisms of learning and memory, and the interaction between multiple brain regions in enabling the ability to learn and remember across different time scales.
Background
Molly is a doctoral student working with Lin Bian in the Developmental Psychology program. Molly got her Bachelor's degree from New York University with a major in Psychology and a minor in Chemistry. After completing her degree in 2018, she spent two years as lab manager for Dr. Andrei Cimpian at NYU.
Research Interests
Molly's main interest is in how children develop gender stereotypes. Specifically, she is interested in the development of stereotypes about gender in non-binary contexts and how children use gender presentation to make inferences about things like ability and leadership potential.
Background
Üli is a doctoral student in Developmental Psychology working with Lin Bian and Susan Goldin-Meadow. She received her B.S. in Neuroscience with a minor in Philosophy from UIC in 2019, where she researched individual differences in facial emotion perception. After graduating, Üli worked as an early education teacher and later as chief of staff at an educational non-profit, implementing research insights from her post-bacc position at the UIC Social-Emotional Teaching and Learning Lab. She also began investigating the origins and consequences of SES evaluations from the faces of older adults at the Chicago Booth Perception and Judgement Lab.
Research Interests
Broadly, Üli is interested in children’s development of social biases, nonverbal communication, and person perception. Specifically, how children may internalize, endorse and respond to stereotypes beyond spoken words - through gesture and face nonverbal modalities. Üli seeks to understand how subtle biases arise in childhood and continue to impact perception, cognition, and behavior across the lifespan.
Background
Dania is a doctoral student and Institute of Education Sciences (IES) fellow in the Developmental Psychology program working with Susan Levine. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A in Psychology and a minor in Education. Prior to graduate school, Dania worked as a research assistant in the Cognitive Development Lab at the University of Chicago.
Research Interests
Dania’s research explores mathematical learning through a developmental lens. Specifically, she is interested in investigating the impact that different socio-emotional, cognitive, and linguistic factors have on children’s mathematical understanding. Through her research, Dania hopes to be able to inform evidence-based interventions that work to close the achievement gap in mathematics.
Background
Sameera is a doctoral student in the Integrative Neuroscience program working with Jai Yu. She graduated from Vellore Institute of Technology with a BTech in Biomedical Engineering. Thereafter, she worked as a research assistant at the Indian Institute of Science with Prof. Rishikesh Narayanan in the Cellular Neurophysiology Laboratory where she used computational modeling to understand how systems maintain stability and robustness in the face of environmental stimuli that drive learning.
Research Interests
Sameera’s research interests predominantly lie in the domains of learning and memory. She hopes to gain a deeper understanding of how reactivation of memories can influence the representations of the environment while learning.
Background
Kaila is a doctoral student in Developmental Psychology working with Dr. Katherine Kinzler. She received her B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Education Studies from Wesleyan University in 2019. At Wesleyan University, she worked in Dr. Anna Shusterman’s Cognitive Development Lab as both a research assistant and a lab manager during her final year.
Research Interests
Kaila is interested in the emergence of social group preferences and intergroup attitudes in children. She is particularly interested in how and what children learn about race, ethnicity, wealth, status, and social inequality more broadly as well as how this informs children’s decisions and judgments about others.
Background
Andrew is a doctoral student in the Integrative Neuroscience program, working with Daniel Margoliash. He earned a bachelor’s degree in music composition with a minor in philosophy. He then completed postbaccalaureate studies in biology, cognitive science, and systems science, while assisting in research on attention, emotional regulation, and neuroeconomics.
Research Interests
Andrew currently studies vocal communication, auditory perception, and mate choice in songbirds. Through a combination of behavioral and extracellular electrophysiological experiments, he aims to understand how female zebra finches evaluate male courtship songs, and how developmental and social factors shape individual preferences. Andrew also leads a project to compile all known mesoscale connectivity in the songbird brain, create an interactive digital resource for this connectome, and analyze its structural organization using graph theory.
Background
Radhika is a doctoral student working with Dr. Katherine Kinzler. She received her B.S. in Biopsychology, Cognition, and Neuroscience from the University of Michigan in 2016. As an undergraduate, she worked in multiple labs with research ranging from language development, to cross-cultural examinations of bicultural identity. Radhika started her doctoral program with Dr. Katherine Kinzler at Cornell University, where she received her M.S. in Psychology. In the fall of 2019, she transitioned to the University of Chicago.
Research Interests
Radhika is interested in studying language and accent as group markers. Her research also explores the development of children’s negotiation skills, and ideas about resource entitlement (in particular as it relates to immigration). She is currently pursuing cross-cultural work examining how children conceptualize leadership and nationality in different cultural contexts.
Background
Nak Won is a doctoral student in the Integrative Neuroscience program working with Marc Berman. He received a Bachelor's degree in Psychology and Brain Cognitive Science from Korea University in 2019 and a Master's degree in Computational Social Science from the University of Chicago in 2021.
Research Interests
Nak Won is broadly interested in how we perceive and interact with the environment surrounding us and how the environment surrounding us affects our behavior and brain. He is also interested in incorporating large-scale experiments and computational models into research in cognition and neuroscience.