Faculty

Jan Born is director of the Department of Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen, Germany. He obtained Ph.D.s in Psychology and Physiology. After stays as research fellow in the Department of Biological Psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and as a post doc at the Department of Physiology at the University of Ulm, Germany, he was appointed full professor of Physiological Psychology at the University of Bamberg, Germany, in 1989. In 1999, he joined the Department of Neuroendocrinology at the University of Lübeck, and changed in 2010 to his current position. Dr. Born's primary research interests are in the dynamics of memory formation in biological systems. He is particularly interested in the memory functions that sleep serves for the central nervous system, metabolic system and the immune system. He is speaker of the collaborative research center "Plasticity and Sleep", founded in 2005 by the German Science Foundation at the Universities of Lübeck and Kiel, Germany.

John T. Bruer is an Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Washington University and President of the James S McDonnell Foundation in St. Louis, Missouri. Dr. Bruer is a member of the National Science Board and also serves on numerous advisory panels nationally and internationally (National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board, USA). He received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Rockefeller University. His research interests include cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, education, and history and philosophy of science. His work in neuroscience has greatly contributed to improving the education system of developing countries. Since joining the McDonnell Foundation in 1986, the foundation has initiated new programs in cognitive neuroscience, applications of cognitive science to education and rehabilitation, analysis of complex systems, and cancer biology.

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Manuel Carreiras is Ikerbasque Professor and director of the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Basque Country, Spain. He obtained the PhD in the university of La Laguna. His primary interest is to understand the architecture of the reading system and the complex mechanisms involved in reading in the monolingual and in the multilingual brain in typical and atypical developmental trajectories. To that end he uses several techniques such as Reaction Time, Eye-tracking, EEG, MEG, fMRI and DTI.

Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz is a full-time Associate Researcher at INSERM U562, Paris, France, where she investigates the development of cognitive functions with brain imaging techniques. Originally qualified as MD, Pediatrician, she received her PhD from the EHESS, Paris, France. The goal of her research is to study the brain functional organization at the beginning of life in order to understand how complex cognitive functions, such as language, music, mathematics, etc… emerge in the human brain. Following up on François Jacob’s intuition that evolution was a tinkerer, twisting old machineries to give rise to new functions, her approach is to examine the primitive functions that are accessible to the human brain to process the external word at the beginning of life, then to study how initial biases in brain organization could be shaped by the human environment to give rise to the mature state. Her pioneering work studying language acquisition with new techniques as such high-density event-related potentials, functional resonance magnetic imaging or optical topography, has impacted the developmental neuroscience.

Susan Fitzpatrick is Vice President with the James S. McDonnell Foundation and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at Washington University School of Medicine (St. Louis), teaching neuroscience. She received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Neurology from Cornell University Medical College. After 5 years pursuing in vivo NMR spectroscopic studies of brain metabolism in the Department of Molecular Biochemistry and Biophysics at Yale University, Dr. Fitzpatrick shifted her career to non-profit administration. Dr. Fitzpatrick lectures and writes on issues concerning the role of private philanthropy in the support of scientific research, and on issues related to the public understanding of science.

She will give her talk with Tom Wyman: http://www.micds.org/technology

Usha Goswami is Professor of Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. She is also Director of the University’s Centre for Neuroscience in Education, which uses EEG techniques to study the neural basis of dyslexia and dyscalculia. Usha Goswami is currently funded by the Medical Research Council to carry out a longitudinal investigation of the brain basis of dyslexia in children. This is a 10-year study involving over 100 children. Prior to moving to Cambridge, she was Professor of Cognitive Developmental Psychology at the Institute of Child Health, University College London 1997 - 2003, and before that she was a University Lecturer in Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge, 1990-1997. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 1987, her topic was reading and spelling by analogy. Her current research examines relations between phonology and reading, with special reference to the neural underpinnings of rhyme and rhythm in children’s reading. She has received a number of career awards, including the British Psychology Society Spearman Medal and President’s Award, the Norman Geschwind-Rodin Prize for Dyslexia research, and Fellowships from the National Academy of Education (USA), the Leverhulme Trust (UK) and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany).

David Klahr holds the Walter van Dyke Bingham Chair of Cognitive Development and Education Sciences in the Department of Psychology at CMU. He is currently Director of the Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER), a doctoral training grant funded by the Office of Education, and PostPIER, a post-doctoral training grant aso funded by the Office of Education. Throughout his career, Klahr has focused on the analysis of complex cognitive processes in such diverse areas as voting behavior, college admissions, consumer choice, peer review, problem solving and scientific reasoning. He pioneered the application of computer based models to questions of cognitive development.

Dr. Klahr's most recent research has investigated the cognitive processes that support children's understanding of the fundamental principles underlying scientific thinking. This work includes both basic research with pre-school children and more applied classroom studies of how to improve the teaching of experimental science in elementary school. One of his current projects is to create an intelligent tutor to teach the procedural and conceptual bases of experiment design.

He is a member of the National Academy of Education, a Fellow of the APA, a Charter Fellow of the APS, a Member of the Society for Research in Child Development, the Cognitive Science Society. He was an Associate Editor of Developmental Psychology and has served on the editorial boards of several cognitive science journals, as well as on the NSF's subcommittee on Memory and Cognitive Processes, and the NIH's Human Development and Aging Study Section. He has served on three Committees of the National Research Council: the Committee on Foundations of Educational Assessment ( Knowing What Students Know, National Academies Press, 2001 ) , the Committee on Research in Education ( Advancing Scientific Research in Education, National Academies Press, 2004 ) and the Committee on Science Learning ( Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8, National Academies Press, 2007). He also serves as member of the Advisory Board for the Understanding Human Cognition initiative of the James S. McDonnell Foundation.

Jacques Mehler is Director of the Language, Cognition and Development Laboratory at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, Trieste. He completed a Ph.D. in Psychology at Harvard University. His research focuses on the human development of Language and Mind and also on the cerebral bases of Language. He and his colleagues perform investigations on very young infants, bilingual children and adults. In some of their studies they use innovative brain imaging equipment, which is especially well suited for the study of very young babies. Dr. Mehler collaborates with researchers from many disciplines - pediatrics, physics, philosophy, engineering and psychology. This combined expertise makes the team better able to explore and understand, to connect models of cognitive development and neurobiology, and to contribute to pediatric science.

Andrea Moro (1962 - ) is full professor of General Linguistics at the Institute ofAdvanced Studies IUSS Pavia, head of the Undergraduate Degrees and former directorof the interfaculty program in cognitive neuroscience at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan which he contributed to found in 1993. He has been Fulbright student and visiting scientist at MIT and at Harvard University several times and obtained a “Diplôme d'études supérieures en théorie de la syntaxe et syntaxe comparative” at the University of Geneva. His main fields of research are theoretical syntax (clause structure, expletives, unaccusativity, locality and syntactic movement), the relation between syntax and semantics (predication, existential sentences, definiteness effect, quasi-copular sentences) and neurolinguistics (focussing on the relation between syntax and the brain). As for the latter field of research, he explores the neural correlates of syntax by the use of neuroimaging techniques. His work has provided evidence that syntax correlates with a selective neural network and non-recursive syntaxes do not activate that syntactic network, thus showing that universal grammar cannot be a conventional artifact on neurobiological grounds. Another field of research is the exploration of the neural correlates of negation where he showed that negation is able to modulate motor-planning neural activities. He published three books: The Raising of Predicates (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Dynamic Antisymmetry (MIT Press, 2000) and The Boundaries of Babel (MIT Press, 2008) and papers on international journals including Linguistic Inquiry and Nature Neuroscience.

Marina Nespor is Proffesor at the Università degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca, Italy. The research program of Marina Nespor concentrates on the sound system of language and how this conveys information about syntax, on the one hand, and segmentation of the speech flow, on the other hand. Within this general line of research, she has concentrated on rhythm and its relation to word order, and how rhythm may help acquire different aspects of language. She has recently also investigated the different cognitive mechanisms responsible for different orders of words in sentences.

Hal Pashler received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985, and is currently a Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. His work has spanned the areas of human attention and human learning and memory. Pashler is the author of The Psychology of Attention (MIT Press, 1998) and Editor in Chief of the Stevens Handbook of Experimental Psychology, Third Edition (Wiley, 2002). In 1999, he received the Troland Prize from the National Academy of Sciences, which cited his "many experimental breakthroughs in the study of spatial attention and executive control, and his insightful analysis of human cognitive architecture". Since 2002, Pashler has been focusing most of his research effort on questions about learning and memory that have direct implications for instructional practices and potential new learning and training technologies. His research examines factors that can reduce the rate at which knowledge is forgotten, including temporal spacing of learning and different ways of using retrieval practice. Pashler was the chair of the panel commissioned by the Institute of Education Sciences (US Dept of Education) to write a practice guide called Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning. His laboratory has been supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the John S. McDonnell Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research.

Pierre Pica was born in Nice in 1951.
He majored in linguistics at the University of Paris III.

After receiving his PhD at Paris VIII University, he spent several years at the Brain and Cognitive Science Center and the Linguistics & Philosophy Departement of MIT where he was awarded a Sloan fellowship.
He is also the recipient of many other awards (Tietgen foundation, (1974), Fyssen Foundation (1984), French Ministry of Research (2004).

He currently coordinates the Center of Research on Indigenous Calculus.
Based at Paris VIII University, this informal structure aims at coordinating the research on Mundurucu (an Amazonian tribe of Para, Brasil), in collaboration with Stanislas Dehaene (INSERM and College De France), Elizabeth Spelke (Harvard University) and colleagues.
Pierre Pica is in particular engaged in understanding how recent discoveries in the domain of core knowlegde and biolinguistics (as defined by Chomsky) can provide a basis for the understanding of indigenous societies.

He is in particular interested in the amazonian languages where peculiar similarities can be obeserved between numerals and kinship terms and the import of this observation for a theory of cognition and neuroscience as well as the conseequence of this for a definition of arithmetics education for these populations.
Together with André Ramos of the departement of education (Funai, Brasil), he coordinates action toward a differentiated education for indigenous populations, in accordance

Externally observable components of human actions carry only a tiny fraction of the information that matters. Human observers are vastly more interested in perceiving or inferring the mental states - the beliefs, desires and intentions - that lie behind the observable shell. If a person checks her watch, is she uncertain about the time, late for an appointment, or bored with the conversation? If a person shoots his friend on a hunting trip, did he intend revenge or just mistake his friend for a partridge? The mechanism people use to infer and reason about another person's states of mind is called a 'Theory of Mind' (ToM). One of the most striking discoveries of recent human cognitive neuroscience is that there is a group of brain regions in human cortex that selectively and specifically underlie this mechanism. My lab studies these brain regions for Theory of Mind, as a case study in the deeper and broader question: how does the brain - an electrical and biological machine - construct abstract thoughts?"

Rebecca Saxe is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) at MIT. Her research is on the neural basis of social cognition, and in particular she is known for proposing the role of the right temporoparietal junction in thinking about people's mental states. Saxe received her BA in psychology and philosophy from Oxford University in 2000, and her PhD in cognitive science from MIT in 2003.

Michael Shadlen MD, PhD is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Professor of Physiology & Biophysics at the University of Washington, where he is also an adjunct Professor of Neurology. He performed undergraduate and medical studies at Brown University and obtained a PhD from UC Berkeley in visual neuroscience under the guidance of Ralph D. Freeman. He received postgraduate clinical training in Neurology at Stanford Medical Center. He then returned to basic neuroscience as a fellow in the laboratory of William T. Newsome, where he began to work on the neurobiology of decision-making. Shadlen studies neurons in the association cortex that process information from the visual cortex to give rise to interpretations, decisions, and plans for behavior. His experiments combine electrophysiology, behavior and computational methods to advance our knowledge of higher brain function.

For more information see this page

Josh Tenenbaum studies learning, reasoning and perception in humans
and machines, with the twin goals of understanding human intelligence
in computational terms and bringing computers closer to human
capacities. He and his collaborators have pioneered accounts of human
intelligence based on inference in sophisticated probabilistic models.
His current work focuses on understanding how people come to be able
to learn new concepts from very sparse data -- how we 'learn to learn'
-- and on characterizing the nature and origins of people's intuitive
theories about the physical and social worlds.

Tenenbaum is Professor of Computational Cognitive Science in the
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and is a member of
the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1999, and was a member of the
Stanford University faculty in Psychology and (by courtesy) Computer
Science from 1999 to 2002. Several of his papers have received
outstanding paper awards or best student paper awards at the IEEE
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), NIPS, and Cognitive
Science conferences. He is the recipient of the New Investigator
Award from the Society for Mathematical Psychology (2005), the Early
Investigator Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists
(2007), the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career
Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association
(2008), and the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of
Sciences (2011).