Advisors

​​Steven T. Piantadosi is a professor at UC Berkeley in Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, where he heads the Computation and Language Lab. He has a PhD from MIT in Brain and Cognitive Sciences and undergraduate degrees in mathematics and linguistics. His work spans neural and cognitive research, with a focus on understanding how children come to know language, math, and abstract concepts. He often uses computational methods, including machine learning, cognitive modeling, mathematical analysis, and Bayesian data analysis. His research methods also include anthropological fieldwork, experimental work with children, and collaboration to study non-human primates and human neuroscience.

Timothy R. Tangherlini, Elizabeth H. and Eugene A. Shurtleff Chair of Undergraduate Education, is a Distinguished Professor in the Dept. of Scandinavian and the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also associate director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and the Faculty Director of the Berkeley Folklore Archive. He has developed computational approaches to stories and storytelling over the past three decades. He has done extensive fieldwork on storytelling among paramedics, and shamanism in South Korea, as well as archival work on rural 19th century Denmark. He has developed generative models of common story genres such as legend, rumor, personal experience narratives. His recent work, featured in The Guardian, the BBC, and Science Friday, has focused on conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate and QAnon, and the conspiratorial machinations on social media related to the January 6th insurrection..

Desmond Ong is an assistant professor of psychology and part of the inter-departmental Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics group at the University of Texas at Austin. He earned his Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University. Dr. Ong’s research focuses on how people—and machines—understand others' emotions and mental states, using a range of methods including computational modeling, language analyses, developmental studies, neuroscientific and psychophysiological methods, and meta-analyses. Dr. Ong's work has been recognized with a 2026 Early Career Award from the Society for Affective Science, a National Science Foundation Early Career Development (CAREER) Award to advance research on affective cognition in AI systems, and three Best Paper awards.

Dana Miller-Cotto is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. She is broadly interested in educational inequity in the U.S., with a particular eye toward understanding 1) the interpretation of minoritized students’ performance on assessments, 2) the co-development and measurement of cognitive processes and math skills, and 3) using cognitive science to improve instructional materials for students who struggle. She conducts this research through various methods, including secondary longitudinal analyses, experimental designs, and meta-analyses. 

David Livermore, PhD is a social scientist devoted to the topics of cultural intelligence (CQ) and global leadership and the author of several award-winning books. He is a founder of the Cultural Intelligence Center, Director of CQ Fellows, and the Ahmass Fakahany Visiting Professor in Global Leadership at Boston University. He is a frequent advisor and speaker to leaders in Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, and governments and has worked in more than 100 countries.