List of Potential Honors Program First Readers

Mariam Aly is an Acting Associate Professor with a focus in the field of cognition. Her central goal is to uncover how the brain's "memory systems" contribute to attention, perception, and prediction. She also currently runs the Aly Lab at UC Berkeley which studies the mechanisms by which attention and perception influence memory for the world around us, and how, once we have formed those memories, we can use them to guide our attention, perception, and goal-directed behavior in the future. 

Dor Abrahamson is an Associate Professor of Secondary Mathematics Education in the Area of Cognition and Development. He researches mathematical cognition, design-based research, mixed-media design for mathematics learning environments, embodied interaction.

David Bamman is an associate professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, where he works in the areas of natural language processing and cultural analytics, applying NLP and machine learning to empirical questions in the humanities and social sciences. His research focuses on improving the performance of NLP for underserved domains like literature (including LitBank and BookNLP) and exploring the affordances of empirical methods for the study of literature and culture. Before Berkeley, he received his PhD in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and was a senior researcher at the Perseus Project of Tufts University. Bamman's work is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, an Amazon Research Award, and an NSF CAREER award.

Sonia Bishop is an Associate Professor in the Psychology Department and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. She is active in the new field of Computational Psychiatry and uses a combination of computational modeling, behavioral experiments and fMRI to examine how threat and reward influence decision-making, pavlovian learning, visual perception and attention in health and disease and to study the associated neural mechanisms. She leads the Affective Cognitive Neuroscience lab.

Martin S. Banks is a Professor of Optometry and Vision Science and an Affiliate Professor of Psychology and Bioengineering. In his campus lab, he focuses his research on visual space perception and sensory combination.

Dr. Silvia Bunge is a Professor in the Psychology Department and at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley. Professor Bunge directs the Building Blocks of Cognition Laboratory, which draws from the fields of cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and education research. Professor Bunge is on the advisory board of four academic societies that organize conferences related to learning and development: the Latin American School on Education, Cognitive, and Neural Sciences, the International Society for Mind, Brain, and Education, Flux: The International Congress for Integrative Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, and National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, and has helped create materials that distill the research on brain development for a broad audience of policymakers and practitioners. Professor Bunge has also spoken at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, developed a webinar for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, D.C., and participated in a workshop on Neuroscience and Learning for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Roy L. Caldwell is a Professor of Integrative Biology. He researches, evolution, animal behavior, behavioral ecology, communication, sensory ecology, aggressive behavior. He explores these any many other topics in his UC Berkeley lab.

John Campbell is a Professor of Philosophy. His interests include the theory of meaning, metaphysics, and philosophy of psychology. His publications include; Past, Space, and Self and Reference and Consciousness.

Jose M. Carmena is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Neuroscience. He researches brain-machine interfaces, neural ensemble computation, neuroprosthetics, sensorimotor learning and control. He sits on the board of the Center for Neural Engineering & Prostheses, and conducts research in his campus lab.

Anne Collins is an Assistant Professor of Psychology. She researches human learning, decision-making and executive functions; computational modeling at multiple levels (cognitive and neuroscience); behavioral, EEG, drug and genes studies in healthy or patient populations. Anne is the primary investigator for the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab.

Clayton Critcher is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Haas School of Business. His interests include the Self (e.g., self-insight, self-regulation, self-affirmation); social and moral judgment; judgment and decision making; cognition and emotion.

Terrence Deacon is a Professor of Anthropology. He researches human evolutionary biology and neuroscience, with the aim of investigating the evolution of human cognition. He is the author of The Symbolic Species and and Incomplete Nature.

Mark D'Esposito is a Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology. He researches working memory and frontal lobe function, functional MRI, cognitive neuroscience He is the primary investigator for The D'esposito Lab.

Michael DeWeese is an Associate Professor of Physics. He researches machine learning, computation, systems neuroscience, auditory cortex, neural coding and has a campus lab.

Anca Dragan is an Assistant Professor in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. She runs the InterACT Lab, which focuses on algorithms for human-robot interaction. They work across different applications, from assistive robots, to manufacturing, to autonomous cars, and draw from optimal control, planning, estimation, learning, and cognitive science. Dragan also helped found and serves on the steering committee for the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab, and is a co-PI of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. She has been honored by the Sloan Fellowship, MIT TR35, the Okawa award, an NSF CAREER award, and the PECASE award.

Susanne Gahl is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Cognitive Science program. She is a psycholinguist with interests in language production, language variation, aphasia (and other communication disorders), and bilingualism.

Jack Glaser is a Professor and Associate Dean of Public Policy. He specializes in political psychology, stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination, hate crime, unconscious social cognition, racial profiling, and policing. Dr. Glaser works with the Center for Policing Equity as one of the principal investigators on a National Science Foundation- and Google-funded project to build a National Justice Database of police stops and use of force incidents.

Alison Gopnik is a Professor of Psychology. Her work focuses on cognitive development, causal learning, psychology and philosophy. Her campus lab explores how young children come to learn about the world around them. Her most recent book is The Philosophical Baby.

Robert J. Glushko is an Adjunct Professor of Cognitive Science. His interests include information-intensive systems and services, semantic standards, information policy, business innovation and entrepreneurship. He is the editor of The Discipline of Organizing. Before joining the Berkeley faculty in 2002, he founded and co-founded four companies, including Veo Systems in 1997, which pioneered the use of XML for electronic business.

William F. Hanks is a Professor of Anthropology, a Berkeley DIstinguished Chair in Linguistic Anthropology and Director of the Social Science Matrix. He is interested in Maya culture, language in culture, discourse, cognition and communication, shamanism, the logic of anthropological inquiry, anthropology of literature. He has written extensively on indexicality, translation and ethnography, as well as colonial history mentioned in his book, Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross. 

Dr. Marti Hearst is a professor in the School of Information and the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. Her primary research interests are user interfaces for search engines, information visualization, natural language processing, and improving MOOCs. She wrote the first book on Search User Interfaces

Rich Ivry is a Professor of psychology and neuroscience. His research program examines many aspects of human performance, with a special interest in sensorimotor control and learning. His lab, the Cognition and Action lab, employs many of the methodologies of cognitive neuroscience including behavioral studies in people with movement disorders, functional neuroimaging, human electrophysiology, and non-invasive brain stimulation.

Lucia Jacobs is a Professor of Psychology. Her interests include cognitive and brain evolution, adaptive patterns in spatial memory, spatial navigation, cognitive sex differences and decision making. Her lab focuses on cognitive biology, studying diverse species, including humans, to identify universal cognitive processes.

William Jagust is a professor in the School of Public Health and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. His laboratory uses multimodal imaging techniques, including structural and functional MRI and PET scanning, to study brain aging and dementia in humans. 

Keith Johnson is a linguist and a phonetician at UC Berkeley and the director of the Phonetics and Phonology lab (the Phonlab). Johnson received his M.A. in Linguistics and Ph.D. in Linguistics from Ohio State University. He currently teaches courses in introductory linguistics (for freshmen), phonetics, and psycholinguistics at UC Berkeley. Johnson's research is centered around the nature of phonetic knowledge and linguistic phonetics, which is concerned with how phonetic factors influence the sound patterns of language. He is also currently working on research in phonetic neuroscience, involving imaging the brain during speech production and perception, with a team at UCSF. 

Prof. DanielaKauferis the Class of 1943 Memorial Chair Professor ofIntegrative Biology and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, and the Associate Dean of Biological Sciences at UC Berkeley. Prof. Kaufer received her PhD in molecular neuroscience from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the departments of Biological Sciences and Neurosurgery at Stanford University. Kaufer’slab is studying how does the brain deal with perturbations like stress and brain injury and what are the mechanisms underlyingtrajectories ofresilience and vulnerability throughout life, and into aging.  The research had been published in top journals including Nature, Nature Medicine, Science Translational Medicine, Nature Neuroscience, Annals of Neurology, eLife and Molecular Psychiatry.  ProfessorKauferis the recipient of the  National Institute of Mental Health Director's New Innovator Award (BRAINS), NARSAD Young and independent Investigator Awards, BAKAR Entrepreneurship Fellowship, And the Archer award for innovation in aging research.

Dacher Keltner is a professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center (greatergood.berkeley.edu). Dacher’s research focuses on the functions of emotional experience and expression, in particular states such as compassion, awe, love, and embarrassment, as well as power, social class, and inequality. Dacher is the co-author of two textbooks, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, The Compassionate Instinct, and The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence. Dacher has won many research, teaching, and service awards, and consulted for Pinterest, the Sierra Club, for Pixar’s Inside Out, and for the Center for Constitutional Rights in its work to outlaw solitary confinement.

Dan Klein is an Associate Professor of Computer Science. He researches statistical natural language processing, including unsupervised learning methods, syntactic parsing, information extraction, and machine translation, and he leads the Berkeley Natural Language Processing Group.

Celeste Kidd is an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department. She received her Bachelors in linguistics and journalism from USC and her PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Rochester. The Kidd Lab studies the processes involved in knowledge acquisition, especially in young children, using a combination of computational and behavioral methods. The team draws inspiration from classic learning theories in education and psychology, like those by Jean Piaget, Maria Montessori, and Lev Vygotsky. They build computational models inspired by these classic theories that allow them to make specific predictions and generate testable competing hypotheses about learning dynamics (for example, the relationship between the learning context and learning outcomes). They also design behavioral experiments to empirically differentiate between competing learning theories. The experiments measure how learners attend and explore throughout the process of learning. Different experiments measure how humans look, explore, and play, starting in infancy and continuing throughout childhood. The use eye-trackers to measure visual fixations to screens during passive viewing, and touchscreens to study touch-based exploration in kid-friendly apps, in addition to studying more traditional play behaviors. Our results are quantitative theories about how data interacts with learners’ growing knowledge. These formal theories can function as the “back-end” for learning technologies, in addition to informing parenting, educational, and clinical practices.

Robert Knight is a Professor of Psychology. He researches attention and memory; neuropsychology and physiology; cognitive neuroscience. He runs a campus lab.

Lance Kriegsfeld is a Professor in the Psychology Department. He received his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University. The broad goal of the research in his campus laboratory is to understand the genetic, cellular, and hormonal mechanisms responsible for the temporal control of motivated behaviors and their underlying physiology.

Michel S. Laguerre is a Professor of global and information technology studies in the African American Studies Department. His interests include digital surveillance, human contexts of big data, North American, European and Caribbean cities, global metropolitan studies, transnational diaspora politics, and contemporary social theories.

Geoffrey Lee is associate professor in the philosophy department at UC Berkeley. His work focuses on issues in philosophy of mind, including questions about consciousness, perception and the self, and he also has published work on foundational questions in cognitive science, particularly on the nature of representation and computation in perceptual processing. He is currently working on a book about the philosophy and science of consciousness.

Jitendra Malik is an Arthur J. Chick endowed Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He specializes in Computer Vision, Computational Modeling of Human Vision, Computational Biology, and Computer Graphics.

Sam Mchombo is an Associate Professor of African American Studies. He researches the syntax and semantics of reciprocal constructions in Bantu languages as part of his investigation of the logical structure of Bantu languages, and of the relation between morpho-syntax and semantics. He is the author of The Syntax of Chichewa.

Don Moore is the Lorraine Tyson Mitchell Chair in Leadership and Communication at Berkeley Haas. He received his PhD in Organization Behavior from Northwestern University. His research interests include overconfidence—including when people think they are better than they actually are, when people think they are better than others, and when they are too sure they know the truth. He is only occasionally overconfident.

Alva Noe is a Professor of Philosophy. He researches perception and consciousness, as well as the theory of art (with special attention to dance as well as visual art). He is the author of Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. Photo credit: Serena Campanini/AGF/Writer Pictures

Bruno Olshausen is a Professor of Vision Science, Neuroscience, and Optometry. He researches computational models of sensory coding and visual perception and directs the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience.

Steve Piantadosi is the Principal Investigator for the Computation and Language Lab. He is interested in understanding the computational mechanisms supporting human language learning and use.

David E. Presti is a Teaching Professor of Neurobiology. His areas of interest and expertise include human neurobiology and neurochemistry, the effects of drugs on the brain and the mind, the clinical treatment of addiction, the evolving conversation between cognitive science and Buddhist philosophy, and the scientific study of mind and consciousness. His classes include: Brain, Mind, and Behavior: An Introduction to Neuroscience; Drugs and the Brain; Matter, Mind, Consciousness; and Consciousness: Buddhist and Neuroscientific Perspectives. He is author of Foundational Concepts in Neuroscience: A Brain-Mind Odyssey (W.W. Norton, 2016) and Mind Beyond Brain (Columbia University Press, 2018).

Michael Ranney is a Professor of Education. He researches the nature of explanation and understanding, in both formal and informal domains. His work is intended to foster the incorporation of challenging information (e.g., on global climate change; see HowGlobalWarmingWorks.org).

Terry Regier is a Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science. His research investigates the relation of language and cognition, through computational methods, behavioral experiments, and cross-language semantic data. He directs the Language and Cognition Lab.

Richard Rhodes is an Associate Professor of Linguistics, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies, and Interim Director of Canadian Studies. He studies American Indian languages, lexical semantics, lexicography, Algonquian languages, Ojibwe, Mixe-Zoquean languages, mixed languages, Michif (Métchif), Sayula Popoluca (Sayuleño).

Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science. His work explores a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence including machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, real-time decision making, multitarget tracking, computer vision, computational physiology, global seismic monitoring, and philosophical foundations.

Geoffrey Saxe is a Professor of Education. His work focuses on U.S., developmental psychology, interplay between culture and cognitive development, mathematical cognition in children, elementary school classrooms, cognitive development, mathematics education.

Alan Schoenfeld is an Elizabeth and Edward Conner Professor of Education and Affiliated Professor of Mathematics. He researches thinking, teaching, learning, productive learning environments, mathematics education, modeling the process of teaching, understanding how and why teachers do what they do.

Mahesh Srinivasan is an Assistant Professor of Psychology. He studies how representations of language and concepts arise and interact in human development and across cultures. Specific interests include flexible and pragmatic uses of language (e.g., polysemy, metaphor, implicature), the representation of abstract concepts (e.g., time, number), linguistic relativity, and social cognitive development in different cultural contexts. He directs the Language and Cognitive Development Lab.

Eve Sweetser is a Professor of Linguistics and Celtic Studies. Her research focuses on subjectivity, syntax, semantics, cognitive linguistics, historical linguistics, Celtic languages, speech act theory, semantic change, grammaticalization, gesture, metaphor, iconicity, viewpoint, construction grammar, semantics of grammatical constructions. She is the Director of the Celtic Studies Program.

Frédéric Theunissen was born in Belgium and raised in Belgium, Spain, and the United States. He fell in love with mathematics, physics, biology and philosophy in french high school and is also a UC product. He got his B.S. in physics and Ph.D. in biophysics from UC Berkeley and did his post-doctoral work at UC San Francisco. Theunissen am fascinated by the brain, sounds and perception. He enjoy teaching computational methods for the next generation of social and biological scientists. The Theunissen Lab aims to understand how complex natural sounds such as human speech, music and animal vocalizations are detected and recognized by the brain.

The over-arching goal of Kevin Weiner's lab research works toward building mechanistic models explaining how brain structure and function contribute to measurable behaviors. They implement a multi-modal approach of anatomical measurements in living and post-mortem individuals across spatial scales to compare to functional measurements in humans (typically high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging). Presently, they have focused on high-level visual cortex (specifically the fusiform gyrus) and face perception as a model structure and a model behavior. Moving forward, they aim to implement the approach to additional brain structures, behaviors, and methodologies (for example, they recently incorporated transcriptomics). His lab has also begun to lay a foundation for translational applications of our neurimaging techniques in patient populations. Additionally, they are interested in data sharing, open science, science communication, comparative neuroanatomy across species, and the history of neuroscience

David Whitney is a Professor of Psychology whose work focuses on visual perception and attention, visually guided action, and cognitive neuroscience. He directs the Whitney lab.

The Wilbrecht lab at UC Berkeley investigates how experience during the juvenile and adolescent period can shape later learning and decision making. We are particularly interested in experience of adversity, early pubertal timing and development of dopaminergic and cortico-striatal circuits. These studies also help us to investigate the neurobiological underpinnings of addiction and autism. We use a wide array of systems neurobiology methods including functional and structural imaging, electrophysiology, and chemo- and optogenetics. 

I did my PhD research in the laboratory of Fernando Nottebohm at the Rockefeller University and postdoctoral training at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory with Karel Svoboda and at UCSF with Michael Merzenich. From 2008-2013, I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology at UCSF and an Investigator at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center. In 2013, I moved my lab to the Psychology Department at the University of California, Berkeley and became a member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. I am a recipient of the 2009 NIMH Biobehavioral Research Award for Innovative New Scientists (BRAINS award) and a Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering (PECASE). I am a board member of the The Center for the Developing Adolescent and Associate editor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.

Fei Xu is a Professor of Psychology. Her work focuses on cognitive development, language development, social cognition in infants and children, learning in infants and young children, statistical learning and statistical inference, psychology and philosophy, computational models of cognitive development. She directs the Berkeley Early Learning Lab.