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. 

Bill Thompson is a cognitive scientist studying human and artificial intelligence. He is an Assistant Professor in the department of Psychology at UC Berkeley and director of UC Berkeley's Computational Cognitive Science laboratory. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, he conducted postdoctoral research in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and earned his PhD in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.

Özlem Ayduk received her B.A. in Psychology and Political Science from Boğaziçi University (1992) and her Ph.D. from Columbia University (1999) where she worked with Prof. Walter Mischel. She joined the Psychology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2002 as an Assistant Professor and became full Professor in 2015. Currently she is serving a 3-year term as Department Chair (2024-2027). 

Professor Ayduk’s research interests focus on the risk and protective factors in interpersonal relationships, self-distancing and its role in emotion regulation and on the development of self-control and emotion competencies in young children. She held the Thomas and Ruth Ann Hornaday Chair in Psychology between 2020-2023, and is a fellow of the American Psychological Society, the Society of Personality & Social Psychology, and the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.

Keanan Joyner, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at UC Berkeley. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Memphis, and his advanced degrees in clinical psychology from Florida State University. He runs the Clinical Research on Externalizing and Addiction Mechanisms (C.R.E.A.M.) Lab at Berkeley, which focuses on using a variety of methods to study the etiology and progression of alcohol and drug addiction, as well as Black mental health topics. He has particular expertise in clinical neuroscience and psychophysiology, behavioral genetics, and advanced quantitative methods. A core theme driving his recent research is understanding and mitigating racial bias in physiological and psychological measurement, and acts in an advisory role for Emitect ai related to this topicWhat's a product or service you'd like to show.

Peter Sheridan Dodds is a Professor at the University of Vermont (UVM) and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Dodds works on system-level problems in many fields, ranging from sociology to physics, maintaining general research and teaching interests in complex systems with a focus on sociotechnical and psychological phenomena including contagion, risk, language, meaning, and stories. He is the Director of the Vermont Complex Systems Institute, co-Director of the Computational Story Lab, and a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science. His methods have encompassed large-scale data collection and analysis, large-scale sociotechnical experiments, building measuring instruments for data-rich complex systems, and the formulation, analysis, and simulation of theoretical models. Dodds has received funding from NSF, NASA, ONR, the MITRE Corporation, MassMutual, and Google, and was awarded an NSF CAREER grant by the Social and Economic Sciences Directorate. Dodds created and has continually evolved Principles of Complex Systems, a two-semester graduate course that is freely and fully online. At UVM, Dodds has led the organic development of a highly successful, scaffolded graduate program in Complex Systems and Data Science.

Amitai Shenhav is an Associate Professor in Berkeley’s Psychology Department and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. He completed his B.A. in Cognitive Science at Berkeley, his Ph.D. in Psychology at Harvard, and his postdoctoral training as a C.V. Starr Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton. He is a recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Neuroscience Research Fellowship, the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Award, and has received early career awards from the Association for Psychological Science, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the Society for Neuroeconomics. His research examines the cognitive and affective processes that underpin motivation and decision-making, including what makes tasks demanding and how people choose whether and how to invest effort in those tasks. His lab addresses these questions using a combination of computational modeling and measures of behavior, subjective experience, and neural activity.