Igor Aleksander
Emeritus Professor, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Igor Aleksander is an Emeritus Professor in the department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College in London. There he holds the active post of Senior Research Investigator. He has been working in artificial intelligence since the 1970s, creating the worlds first neural pattern recognition system in 1981 and studying machine consciousness during the last 15 years. He won the Charles Babbage medal from the UK Institute of Electronic Engineers in 1962, a lifetime achievement award for contributions to informatics from the UK Institute of Electrical and Engineers in 2000, and the John Taylor award for exceptional contributions to neural networks by the Brazilian computing community in 2013, and is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in the UK.
Colin Allen
Provost Professor, History & Philosophy of Science, Cognitive Science
Provost Professor and Director, Cognitive Science
Colin Allen is Provost Professor of Cognitive Science and of History and Philosophy of Science in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he has been a faculty member since 2004. He also holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Philosophy and is a faculty member of IUs Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior and Program for Neuroscience. He became director of IUs Cognitive Science program in July 2011. Allens main area of research is on the philosophical foundations of cognitive science, particularly with respect to nonhuman animals. He is interested in the scientific debates between ethology and comparative psychology, and current issues arising in cognitive ethology.
Tommy Blanchard
Post-Doctoral Researcher, Psychology
Tommy Blanchard researches the neural mechanisms of decision-making and prefrontal cortex function, using neuroimaging and single-unit recording. He earned his PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Rochester. Currently, he is a post-doctoral researcher in the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Harvard University.
Kathleen Cho
Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Integrative Neuroscience
Kathleen received her B.S. with Honors in Neuroscience and a B.A. in History at Brown University. At MIT, she studied learning and memory mechanisms in the visual cortex in Mark Bears laboratory and earned a Ph.D. in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. She joined Vikaas Sohals laboratory at UCSF as a postdoctoral fellow, to study the mechanisms of functional circuits in the context of mental illness.
Michael Connell
Cofounder and CEO
Dr. Connell is CEO of the educational technology company Native Brain, which produces adaptive learning technologies to support every childs success in math. He has been a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft Corporation, Sunburst Communications, Inc., and Lexia Learning Systems, Inc.; a faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Dartmouth College (Educational Neuroscience program); and an educational consultant to schools, non-profit organizations, the federal government, and corporations.
Kafui Dzirasa
Associate Professor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering
Kafui is an Associate Professor at Duke University with appointments in the Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Neurobiology, Biomedical Engineering, and Neurosurgery. His ultimate goal is to combine his research, medical training, and community experience to improve outcomes for diverse communities suffering from Neurological and Psychiatric illness.
Samuel Gershman
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Samuel Gershman is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work focuses on computational models of learning and memory, and he is interested in the extent to which we can understand the brain as performing statistical inference.
Vivian Hemmelder
M.S. in Neuroscience
Vivian Hemmelder received her bachelor’s degree in Psychobiology from the University of Amsterdam. After working in several neuroscience labs in Holland and the United States, she joined the Harvard Program in Neuroscience, where she conducted research on learning and decision-making in the labs of Naoshige Uchida and Samuel Gershman. Hemmelder recently received her Masters degree in Neuroscience from Harvard.
Chris Holdgraf
Ph.D. Candidate, Neuroscience
Chris Holdgraf is a graduate researcher in Bob Knight’s Cognitive Neuroscience Research Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies the ways that the human brain is able to understand the world in the face of noisy and incomplete data, in particular how the auditory cortex understands sound. He is an active science writer and an editor for the Berkeley Science Review.
Bertram Malle
Professor of Psychology, Dept. of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences
Bertram F. Malle was born and educated in Graz, Austria, before coming to the United States in 1990. He received his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1995 and joined the University of Oregon Psychology Department. Since 2008 he has been a Professor at the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. He received the Society of Experimental Social Psychology Outstanding Dissertation award in 1995, won a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 1997, and served as president of the Society of Philosophy and Psychology. Malle’s research has been funded by the NSF, U.S. Army, Templeton Foundation, and Office of Naval Research.