Society Fellows

David Badre is Professor and Chair of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences at Brown University, where he is also on the faculty of the Carney Institute for Brain Science. He received his PhD from MIT and did his postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley before joining Brown as faculty in 2008. Dr. Badre’s research focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of cognitive control. He has made several contributions to our understanding of the computational and neural mechanisms that underlie flexible and adaptive behavior. Dr. Badre’s research has been recognized by numerous awards. He is author of the book, On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done, on the neuroscience of cognitive control.

David Barner is a Canadian developmental psychologist whose work bridges questions in psychology and linguistics, with a focus on the origins of conceptual content in child development. Barner takes a cross-linguistic approach to understand how the structure of natural language impacts children’s acquisition of conceptual content in diverse domains, including color, number, time, and the representation of objects. His work also asks how linguistic structures impact logical reasoning, pragmatic inference, and our ability to reason about other people’s minds. Across a variety of cases, Barner argues that ostensibly lexical concepts like “exactly five”, “rabbit”, or “blue” are complex structures that are composed online through the interaction of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic processes. Barner completed his undergraduate degree in Psychology with a Minor in Linguistics at McGill University in 1999 followed by a MSc in Communications Sciences and Disorders at McGill in 2001. In 2006 he completed a PhD in Psychology at Harvard University under the supervision of Jesse Snedeker and Susan Carey, before accepting a position as Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto in 2006. Barner is currently Professor of Psychology at UC San Diego.

Nick Ellis is Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at the University of Michigan where he is also affiliated with the English Language Institute, the Center for the Study of Complex Systems, and the Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science. He researches language and cognition, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, applied linguistics, and psycholinguistics. He is well-known for his work in second language acquisition especially (1) explicit and implicit language learning and their interface, (2) usage-based acquisition and the probabilistic tuning of the system, (3) vocabulary, phraseology, and construction grammar, and (4) learned attention and language transfer. His emergentist research includes language as a complex adaptive system, networks analysis, scale-free linguistic distributions and robust learning, and computational modeling. He began in the UK with a BA in Psychology and Physiology from the University of Oxford and a PhD in the cognitive psychology of developmental dyslexia before joining the faculty of the University of Wales Bangor. He is a Fellow of the APS. He was awarded the Distinguished Scholarship and Service Award by the American Association of Applied Linguistics. He served as Editor then General Editor of Language Learning.

Matthew Goldrick is Professor of Linguistics and, by courtesy, Psychology at Northwestern University, where he serves as Director of the Cognitive Science Program. He holds a BA, MA, and PhD in Cognitive Science from the Johns Hopkins University and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University. In close collaboration with linguists, psychologists, computer scientists, and cognitive neuroscientists, he has examined the implications of gradiently activated structured representations for cognition. Highlights of his work combining computational modeling, behavioral experiments, and acoustic phonetic analysis include: how  multilingual speech and language processing is impacted by the gradient co-activation of representations across languages; the impact of graded representations and processes on acquired speech and language impairments; and the nature of the cognitive mechanisms that support structured computation with gradiently activated representations. Through teaching, administrative roles at Northwestern, and work with the Cognitive Science Society, he has helped enhance infrastructure supporting cognitive science in higher education. As a founding member of Reviewer Zero, he has worked to help reimagine scientific peer review to support a more diverse and inclusive cognitive science.

Ulrike Hahn is a professor at the Department of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck College, University of London, where she also serves as director of the Centre for Cognition, Computation and Modelling. Ulrike Hahn’s research interests have covered categorization, similarity, language and language acquisition, and, first and foremost, questions of human rationality. Here, here research examines human judgment, decision-making, and the rationality of everyday argument. She is presently particularly interested in the way our beliefs are shaped by virtue of being parts of larger communicative social networks. Ulrike Hahn has been a member of the Senior Editorial Board of Topics in Cognitive Science, an Action Editor for Cognitive Psychyshology, for Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, and Psychological Science. She was awarded the Cognitive Section Prize by the British Psychological Society, the Kerstin Hesselgren Professorship by the Swedish Research Council, and the Anneliese Maier Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She is a fellow of the German National Academy of Science (Leopoldina), a fellow of the APS, and holds an honorary doctorate from Lund University, Sweden

Anna Papafragou is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Associate Director for Research at Penn’s MindCORE Center for Outreach, Research and Education. She also serves as the Director of Penn’s interdisciplinary Graduate Certificate Program in Language and Communication Sciences. Her research interests focus on how children acquire meaning in language, how language is used and understood, and how language interfaces with human perception and cognition. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from University College London and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has been supported by multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. She has served as President of the Cognitive Science Society, a member of the CSS Governing Board and the Chair of the 2016 Annual CSS Meeting in Philadelphia. She has co-founded the Experiments in Linguistic Meaning (ELM) conference hosted biennially at Penn since 2020. She is currently Associate Editor for Cognition and Language Learning and Development, and has co-edited the Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon.