Governing Board Elections

University of Pennsylvania

My name is Sudeep Bhatia, and I am an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. I build computational models of human cognition and behavior. Although in the past my focus has been on decision making, in recent years, my work has expanded to include reasoning, memory, and social cognition. Currently, I am particularly interested in using large-scale digital data to recover the mental representations underlying naturalistic cognitive tasks. My broader goal is to scale up cognitive models so they can better reflect how cognition operates in the real world. If elected to the board, I aim to help CSS grow its influence and visibility in an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. I believe we can do this by drawing on our community’s technical expertise and strong tradition of computational modeling. I am also committed to supporting international engagement and providing meaningful opportunities for PhD students and early-career researchers. Finally, I bring prior experience serving on the board of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, where I helped launch initiatives aimed at supporting underrepresented scholars and fostering stronger connections between European and U.S. research communities.

Netflix

My career spans industry and academia across diverse disciplines, bringing a wealth of experience to the governing board. I earned my Ph.D. in Computer & Cognitive Science in 2007 and have since held positions as post-doc, assistant, associate, and now adjunct professor in psychology departments at both liberal arts colleges (University of Richmond) and research universities (UIUC and Indiana University Bloomington). In 2018, I shifted my primary focus to industry, founding a math education startup and working as a data scientist, machine learning scientist, and now DS/ML manager of a team focused on cognitive modeling at Netflix. Through that time, I’ve been a consistent member of and contributor to the Society through presentations, workshops, and symposia.

If elected, I will champion a ‘big tent’ cognitive science approach. We can and must remain a research-oriented community moved by the most profound questions; we also thrive best when we embrace collaboration and community across disciplines, methodologies, and professional settings. I am committed to normalizing varied career paths for emerging cognitive scientists and fostering systems that strengthen connections among existing cognitive science research hubs. By cultivating a unified community that spans disciplines and settings, we can enrich our field and lay a robust foundation for the future.

Western University

I am a Professor of Psychology and Vice President (Research) at Western University in Ontario, Canada. I study language and concepts, investigating the ways knowledge is learned and retrieved, and shaped by the multimodal nature of human experience. For the last 3 decades, my work on these topics has been funded by Canada’s national funding councils and has involved methodologies from developmental science, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. I served as Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, Associate Editor of the Journal of Memory and Language, and on the Editorial Boards of 4 other journals. In 2016 I co-founded Women in Cognitive Science – Canada, and through that organization developed programming to advance openness and inclusivity in our discipline.

I attended my first CSS meeting in 2001 in Edinburgh and have published in both Cognitive Science and TOPICS. The Society is distinctive in its international and interdisciplinary mission – these values are core to my own research and I advance them in my role as VPR at Western. I see CSS as a vital forum for engaging and supporting the next generation of Cognitive Science researchers. I would relish the opportunity to contribute to their future success.

Dartmouth College

As a governing board member, my top priorities would be to (1) work to deepen the integration of relevant philosophical and linguistic research as a core part of the cognitive science society, (2) continue to improve the submission and reviewing process, (3) make sure the society remains financially accessible to students and other researchers without access to large budgets; a growing problem given the pointed reduction in federal funding in the United States, and (4) work with private funding agencies to create new grant opportunities that can help sustain the next generation of Cognitive Scientists in their research.

I received my Ph.D. in Philosophy and Psychology from Yale University in 2015, through an ad hoc joint-degree program that I pioneered. I subsequently held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. In 2019, I became the first faculty member in Dartmouth’s Program in Cognitive Science and have led its development since. We recently completed our third new faculty hire and have grown rapidly in both graduate and undergraduate education. At Dartmouth, I am affiliated with the Departments of Philosophy, Psychology, and Computer Science.

My interdisciplinary research draws on a broad range of methods including those in psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. Much of the work I’ve done is related in one way or another to modal cognition—the way our minds represent and reason about possibilities—and how this shapes high-level cognition, from decision-making, to linguistic communication, to causal and moral reasoning. I also work on theory of mind, concepts, formal semantics, and philosophy of science. My work on these topics has been published in journals that span the cognitive sciences, e.g., PNAS, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Psychological Review, Philosophical Perspectives, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Mind & Language, Semantics and Pragmatics, Psychological Science, and Cognition.

I’ve been attending the Cognitive Science Society’s annual meetings since I was a graduate student, when it became a home conference for me while pursuing a joint degree in philosophy and psychology. I’m grateful that it is now a home for my lab too: there is no other conference with a tent big enough to fit our work, which spans a broad range of disciplines and methods. I’d be thrilled to be able to give back to the society as a governing board member with a focus on ensuring that our society continues to be accessible to everyone engaged in cognitive science, both across disciplines and across differences in resources, professional opportunities, and lived experiences. Such diversity is critical for cognitive science because differing perspectives allow us to see the problems we work on more clearly.

National University of Singapore

I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the National University of Singapore. I received my PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Kansas (USA) in 2017, and completed my post-doctoral training at the University of Warwick (UK) before starting my current position at NUS in 2019.

The central goal of my research program is to characterize the nature of the mental lexicon. People know, on average, tens of thousands of words and concepts. How we are able to efficiently retrieve words and knowledge from this vast store of information? To what extent are the lexicons of people from various cultures similar and different? My research uses experimental and computational approaches to study the organization of these cognitive and linguistic representations.

I have been an active and current member of the Cognitive Science Society, having attended and presented my research at previous conferences (Rotterdam 2024, Sydney 2023, Online in 2021). I have also reviewed member abstracts and proceedings for the conference, and multiple manuscripts for the society’s flagship journal Cognitive Science. If elected, I would be a voice for cognitive scientists in the Asia-Pacific region and seek to amplify diverse perspectives in the society.

University of California, San Diego

My name is Salih Ozdemir. I am finishing my second year of PhD in Experimental Psychology at UC San Diego, where I am awarded the Jacobs Endowed Fellowship by the School of Social Sciences. Previously, I completed an MA in Cognitive Psychology at Koc University, Turkey, under a scholarship from the Turkish Scientific Research Council (TUBITAK).

As an aspiring cognitive developmental scientist, I coalesce ideas from philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computational modeling in my research. This causes me to have a particularly pronounced connection with the Cognitive Science Society, as the multidisciplinary science promoted by CSS is always of interest to me and the research I do.

As a first generation international student, I am connected with peers and students across the US and the world, and this allows me to sense what issues are pressing and present in young scientists’ lives. Therefore, if I am elected to the position, I intend to prioritize the issues graduate students face in these confusing and scary times we are going through. I believe these experiences and skills enable me to identify important topics and communicate them to the governing board.