Leyla Isik, Principal Investigator
Leyla is the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University, and holds a secondary appointment in the department of Biomedical Engineering. Before joining JHU, Leyla was a postdoc at MIT and Harvard in the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, where she worked with Nancy Kanwisher and Gabriel Kreiman. She received her PhD from MIT where she was advised by Tomaso Poggio, and was an undergraduate right here at JHU.
Haemy Lee Masson, Postdoc
Haemy obtained a Ph.D. in Brain Imaging Engineering (2016) at Korea University. Before joining JHU, she worked with Hans Op de Beeck at KU Leuven in Belgium. Her research focuses on the neural basis of social (touch) scene processing in healthy adults and how these processes go astray in autism. To address these questions, she employs multimodal neuroimaging techniques and computational modeling. She is also a guest scientist at the Max Planck Institute for intelligent systems in Germany.
Emalie McMahon, PhD Student
website: emaliemcmahon.com
Emalie is a PhD student in the Department of Cognitive Science. Prior to joining the lab, she complete a post-baccalaureate research fellowship at the NIH in the lab of Leslie Ungerleider. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Tennessee.
Paul Soulos, PhD Student
Paul is a PhD student in the Department of Cognitive Science. He is interested in neurosymbolic computation, reasoning as program induction, and bringing together Cognitive Science and Neuroscience through computational tools and imaging techniques. Before grad school, Paul was a software engineer at Fitbit and Google working on applications and wearable devices. He received his BS in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics and his MS in Cognitive Science at JHU.
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Manasi Malik, PhD Student
Manasi is a PhD student in the Department of Cognitive Science. Prior to joining JHU, she worked at TCS Innovation Labs to develop deep learning models to improve advertising effectiveness. She did her B.Tech from IIIT Delhi and worked on multisensory perception for her bachelors' thesis at National Brain Research Center, India.
Hannah Small, PhD Student
website: hannah-small.com
Hannah is a PhD student in the Department of Cognitive Science. She is interested in the spatial organization of the brain. Before joining the lab, she worked on how the brain processes language as a research tech in Ev Fedorenko’s lab at MIT. In undergrad, she studied biology and computer science at University of Richmond, where she researched action potential modulation in an ion-channel electrophysiology lab.
Angira Shirahatti, MA student
Angira is a Masters student in the Department of Cognitive Science. Prior to joining JHU, she was a Product Designer at Etsy, working on tools for Etsy sellers. She received her BA in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, where she focused primarily on human-computer interaction.
Lucy Chang, Undergraduate RA
Lucy is from San Jose, California and currently a sophomore undergrad majoring in Neuroscience and minoring in CS. In the lab, she is investigating social cognition through a computational analysis of the neural data. In her free time, she likes playing with her dog, reading, and drawing.
Josh Kim, Undergraduate RA
Josh is a Computational Neuroscience and Computer Science undergraduate student at JHU. Before joining the lab, he worked at the Delineo Disease Modeling to develop a COVID-19 community-level simulator. He is now interested in social cognition and computer vision.
Emmanuel Ochieng, Undergraduate RA