Fellows

Francesco d’Errico is an archaeologist who works as CNRS Director of Research at the University of Bordeaux in France and Professor at the Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour, University of Bergen. In 2014 he was awarded the CNRS silver medal.  His research interests focus on the origins of modern behaviour in Hominins and specifically the emergence of cultural innovations in the African Middle Stone Age and the transition between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon cultures.

Russell Gray completed his Ph.D. at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1990. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and has been awarded several fellowships, as well as the inaugural Mason Durie Medal for his contributions to social science. Russell Gray’s research spans the areas of linguistics, animal cognition, philosophy of biology and the evolution of human and animal behavior. He pioneered the application of computational evolutionary methods to questions about linguistic prehistory. From June 2014 Russell Gray was Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Mankind in Jena, in June 2020 he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

Dr. Janet Hsiao is Head and Associate Professor in Department of Psychology, a PI of State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and a Steering Committee member of Institute of Data Science at University of Hong Kong. She received her Ph.D. from University of Edinburgh and was a postdoctoral researcher at UC San Diego. She is best known for her research on learning and visual cognition using interdisciplinary approaches. She received Best Language Modelling Paper Prize from the Cognitive Science Society, and serves on the Governing Board of the Society. She is also Editor-in-Chief of British Journal of Psychology.

Tamar Kushnir is a Professor in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. Her lab examines learning and conceptual change in young children with a focus on learning about the mind, the self, and the social world. Research topics include rational social and causal learning, developmental origins of our beliefs in free will and agency, normative reasoning, cultural influences on social and moral learning, belief revision and epistemic trust, and the role of imagination in social cognition.

Danielle S. McNamara, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology and Executive Director of the Learning Engineering Institute at Arizona State University. She is an expert in the fields of cognitive and learning sciences, comprehension, writing, text and learning analytics, computational linguistics, and intelligent tutoring systems. Her research involves the development and assessment of natural language processing tools (e.g., Coh-Metrix), game-based intelligent tutoring systems (e.g., iSTART, Writing Pal; see soletlab.asu.edu), and the development of large-scale digital learning platforms (e.g., ASU Learning@Scale). She is the founding Editor of APA Technology, Mind, & Behavior, and has produced over 500 scholarly writings.

Marco Zorzi investigates the computational bases of cognition, from development to skilled performance and to breakdowns of processing in atypical development or after brain damage. His research combines computational modeling based on neural networks, behavioral methods, neuropsychology, and neuroimaging. His interests include numerical cognition, reading and dyslexia, spatial representations and attention. In recent years he pioneered the use of unsupervised deep learning for computational modeling in a cognitive science perspective. Zorzi received doctoral and postdoctoral training in Italy (Trieste, Padova) and UK (UCL). He is a Professor at the University of Padova, where he teaches Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Psychology.

Chen Yu is the Director of the Developmental Intelligence Lab at The University of Texas at Austin.  By collecting and analyzing micro-level multimodal behavioral data using state-of-the-art sensing and computational techniques, the lab aims to better understand human learning and early development and help improve learning of children with developmental deficits. Dr. Chen received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Rochester.