Leyla Isik, Principal Investigator
Leyla is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University, and holds appointments in the department of Biomedical Engineering and Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute. Her main research interests are in understanding the cognitive and neural basis of dynamic, social vision, and how we might implement these abilities in AI systems. Before joining JHU, Leyla was a postdoc at MIT and Harvard in the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines. She received her PhD from MIT, and was an undergraduate here at JHU.
Zhenan Shao, Postdoctoral Fellow
website: https://shaox192.github.io/
Zhenan received her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the Department of Psychology and a Master’s in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, working with Prof. Diane M. Beck. She previously earned a BS in Psychology from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. She is broadly interested in how biological and artificial intelligence represent and process visual information, and how insights from human brain and behavior can inform the development of more robust and interpretable computational models.
Rebecca Rennert, Postdoctoral Fellow
Rebecca received her PhD from the Department of Psychology at Emory University, specializing in Cognitive and Computational Sciences and Developmental Science. She worked with Dr. Daniel Dilks to study the development of scene perception, including navigation and scene categorization. Rebecca previously received her BS in Neurobiology at Georgetown University. She is largely interested in using developmental methods to study the organization of human visual perception, including how this knowledge is structured cognitively and neurally.
Kathy Garcia, PhD student
website: https://garciakathy.github.io/
Kathy is a PhD student in the Department of Cognitive Science. Prior to joining JHU, she completed a post baccalaureate research fellowship (NU-PREP) at the Northwestern University Interdepartmental Neuroscience program. She also worked as a data consultant in Fortune 100 finance companies after completing her BS at Stanford University.
Ming Zhou, PhD student
website: https://mzhou52.github.io/
Ming is a PhD student in the Department of Cognitive Science. Prior to joining JHU, he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from the Faculty of Psychology at Beijing Normal University, working on large-scale naturalistic neuroimaging datasets. He is broadly interested in using computational models to understand the neural representations underlying human object perception and social perception. In his free time, he enjoys playing ball sports and cooking.
.png)
Vatsala Nema, PhD student
website: Vatsala Nema | LinkedIn
Vatsala, is a PhD student in the Department of Cognitive Science. She is interested in understanding abstractions used in multimodal learning in both humans and AI models. She graduated with an Integrated BS-MS from IISER Bhopal and worked on Interpretability for her Masters thesis at IIT Hyderabad. Prior to this, she was a Lab Manager at the SerreLab at Brown University. Outside of work, she finds meaning in very many hobbies which include playing the piano, making art and playing sports.
Zirui Chen, PhD student
zchen160@jh.edu
website: zche377.github.io
Zirui is a PhD student in the Department of Cognitive Science. He is broadly interested in how brains and deep neural networks come to represent the visual world, and which aspects of those representations are shared across systems. Prior to joining JHU, he earned his bachelor’s degree from Emory University, where he studied human scene perception with Daniel Dilks.
Ishi Jain, Undergraduate Student
Ishi is a junior undergraduate student, studying Computational Neuroscience at JHU. She is interested in social and language cognition, specifically in individuals with ASD. In her free time, she enjoys crocheting and playing with her bunny.
Crystal Li, BS/MSE Student
Crystal is a senior studying applied math and neuroscience. She is concurrently pursuing her master’s degree in applied math and is working in the lab on her thesis project, which analyzes representational dimensionality in theory-of-mind network brain regions. Crystal is generally interested in how intelligent systems represent concepts and relationships in order to make inferences from limited data.