Background
Jharnae is a doctoral student in the Integrative Neuroscience program at the University of Chicago and is working with Brian Prendergast. She received her B.S. in Biological Sciences in the spring of 2019 from the University of Chicago.
Research Interests
Jharnae’s research interests predominantly lie in the relationship between circadian rhythmicity and metabolic disease.
Background
Xinyue is a doctoral student in the Cognition program working with Akram Bakkour. She received her B.S. in Psychology and B.A. in Communication from UC San Diego in 2020. After graduation, she completed the MAPSS program and worked as an Instructional Assistant at the University of Chicago.
Research Interests
Xinyue is interested in the cognitive and neural mechanisms of human memory and decision making. Broadly speaking, she wants to explore whether and how people recall episodic memory while making decisions, and any factors that interact with this process.
Background
Huibo (Daisy) is a doctoral student in the Integrative Neuroscience program working with Leslie Kay. She graduated from St. John's College, a great books college, in Annapolis Maryland in 2017, with a B.A. in Philosophy and History of Math and Science. After graduation, she worked with Dr. Sarah London at the University of Chicago as a research assistant, studying how experience alters neural functions and behaviors, in zebra finch songbirds.
Research Interest
Huibo's (Daisy's) current research interest primarily lies in revealing the biological mechanisms of behaviors. Using rats as the model, she studies the neural, electrophysiological and psychophysiological mechanisms underlying olfactory behaviors.
Background
Seoyoung is a doctoral student in the Integrative Neuroscience program working with Professor Akram Bakkour. She received her B.A. in Psychology from New York University Abu Dhabi and her M.A. in Cognitive Science from the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences at the University of Trento, Italy.
Research Interests
Seoyoung is interested in understanding the neural mechanisms underlying the interaction between memory and decision-making. She hopes to use brain imaging and computational modelling to investigate what types of information are being sampled from our past experiences when we make decisions and how this process is represented in the brain.
Background
Sunny is a doctoral student in Integrative Neuroscience working with Steve Shevell. He received his BA in Psychology from the University of Hong Kong in 2015 and his Master's in Psychology from the University of Chicago in 2017. His current research focuses on understanding the perceptual resolution of visual ambiguity.
Research Interests
Sunny's interests include visual perception, attention, and their intersections. To date, he has worked on visual search, 3D object perception, optic flow, and color vision. Currently, he is investigating whether the ambiguity of visual information itself is a feature of an object, similar to how color or motion is an object feature.
Background
Vanessa is a Developmental Psychology doctoral student as well as an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research fellow working with Lin Bian. She graduated from Cornell University and received her Bachelor’s in Psychology and Sociology with a minor in Inequality Studies. After graduating, she worked as the lab manager for the Emerging Minds Lab at Arizona State University, where she conducted research on curiosity in infants and young children.
Research Interests
Vanessa’s research interests can be found at the intersections of social and developmental psychology and early education. She uses an interdisciplinary framework to investigate how children's social biases about power, privilege, and inequality in educational contexts are influenced by society and their beliefs about social groups.
Background
Karina is a doctoral student in the Developmental Psychology and Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Fellowship programs working with Susan Levine. She graduated from the University of Chicago in 2021 with a B.S. in Mathematics and a B.A. in Psychology.
Research Interests
Karina’s interests center around the intersection of mathematics, student learning processes, and instructional strategies. Through focused examinations of crucial early mathematics concepts including fractions and probability, combined with contextualization of the learning environment, she hopes to form a deeper understanding of mathematical development and apply findings to inform practical, equitable, and effective educational practices.
Background
Rachel King is a doctoral student in the developmental psychology program at the University of Chicago working primarily with Katherine D. Kinzler. She completed her bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her master’s degree at Cornell University.
Research Interests
Rachel is broadly interested in social group concepts – especially stereotypes – and how they change with time and experience. Her current research examines the intersection between socioeconomic, political, and geographic social group concepts in adults and children. Rachel also studies the development of social mobility beliefs and parents’ strategies for talking to their children about wealth inequality.
Background
Henry is a doctoral student and Neubauer fellow in Computational Cognitive Neuroscience working with Ed Awh. He graduated from Brown University in 2019 with a B.S. in Cognitive Neuroscience. For his honors thesis, he researched how people create abstract schemas across related contexts, and where these schemas are represented in the brain, under the supervision of David Badre and Avi Vaidya. After graduation, he worked as a Research Coordinator in Russell Poldrack’s lab, working with Patrick Bissett to study inhibition and other high-level components of cognitive control.
Research Interests
Henry is broadly interested in studying the components of cognitive control using both behavioral and neuroimaging (fMRI, EEG) measures. At the center of this interest are the representations of working memory, along with the mechanisms for their maintenance and modification. He is also interested in understanding other components of control such as attention, inhibition, and goal representation, and how they overlap, differ, and interact with working memory.
Background
Grace Huang is a doctoral student working with Dr. Lin Bian and Dr. Susan Levine at the University of Chicago. Grace received her Bachelor’s degree from Northeastern University with a major in Psychology and a minor in Business Administration. During her studies at NU, Grace worked in Dr. John Coley’s lab where she studied “cognitive construals”, such as essentialism, and how they affect people’s understanding and reasoning about the world. After graduating from NU, Grace obtained a Master’s degree in Education from Boston University. Grace is interested in questions related to gender stereotypes and social biases in educational settings. In her free time, Grace enjoys pour-over coffee, yoga, and traveling.