2020 FACULTY
AMANDA
SEED
University of St. Andrews
I study the evolution of cognition, in particular causal reasoning, episodic thinking and executive function in primates and children. Most recently, I am exploring the relationship between some of these different cognitive skills and how they combine to affect performance on problem-solving tasks.
ANDREW
BARRON
Macquarie University
I study mechanisms of cognition and the insect brain.
ANNA
CORWIN
Saint Mary's College of California
My research seeks to understand how language and interaction shape human experience. My work focuses on how humans understand and interact with the divine and each other and how these patterns of interaction shape health and well-being.
BRIANA
TOOLE
Claremont McKenna College
My research lies at the intersection of epistemology, feminist philosophy, and critical race theory. My past research examined the relationship between knowledge and social identity, but my current research investigates epistemological systems (like white supremacy and patriarchy).
COLIN
ALLEN
University of Pittsburgh
My research concerns the philosophical foundations of cognitive science, particularly the scientific study of cognition in nonhuman animals and issues raised by artificial intelligence. I have also published widely on topics in philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, and humanities computing.
ERICA
CARTMILL
UCLA
I study the acquisition and evolution of human language. My work bridges anthropology and psychology and involves both comparative and developmental approaches to communication.
JACOB
FOSTER
UCLA
I am interested in the birth, life, and death of ideas. Fundamentally, I aim to understand the social world as constituted by, and constitutive of, ideas, beliefs, and practices.
JAY
GARFIELD
Smith College and
Harvard Divinity School
My research addresses issues in Cognitive Science, the philosophy of mind, Buddhist Philosophy, the history of Western Philosophy, modern Indian philosophy, Ethics, and cross-cultural interpretation.
JOSEP
CALL
University of St. Andrews
My research focuses on technical and social problem solving in animals with a special emphasis on the great apes. Ultimately, my goal is to elucidate how cognition evolves.
PETER
TODD
Indiana University
I study the evolved cognitive mechanisms that humans and other organisms (terrestrial or otherwise) use to meet the challenges posed by their environments, including finding and choosing mates, food, information, and other resources.
RAFAEL
NÚÑEZ
UCSD
I investigate cognition from the perspective of the embodied mind. I am particularly interested in high-level cognitive phenomena such as conceptual systems, abstraction, and inference mechanisms, and the biological and cultural phenomena that make them possible.
STEPHEN VAISEY
Duke University
The main goal of my research is to understand moral and political beliefs: what they are, where they come from, and how they change (or not) over time.
MICHAEL
MUTHUKRISHNA
London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
My research focuses on answering three related questions: (1) How did humans evolve? (2) What features of our psychology and sociality underlie human culture and cultural evolution? (3) How can answers to these questions help tackle some of the challenges we face as a species?
DORA
BIRO
University of Oxford
I study collective animal behaviour, focusing on how animals pool individual cognitive capacities to improve collective performance, how groups generate novel innovations through joint problem-solving, and how these innovations are stored and built upon over time to give rise to cultural phenomena.
SETH
LAZAR
Australian National University
I have worked on the ethics of war, self-defence and risk, and am now the project leader for the multi-disciplinary Humanising Machine Intelligence Grand Challenge project at ANU, which aims to explore the foundations and design of democratically legitimate data and AI systems.
CRISTINE
LEGARE
UT Austin
I examine the interplay of the universal human mind and the variations of human culture to address fundamental questions about cognitive and cultural evolution.
SUSAN
GOLDIN-MEADOW
University of Chicago
My research identifies the fundamental properties of language and explores how gesture and spoken language shapes thought and cognitive development.
TOM
GRIFFITHS
Princeton University
My research investigates how people solve challenging computational problems every day, make predictions about future events, learn new causal relationships, and discover how objects should be divided into categories.
JOSH
TENENBAUM
MIT
My colleagues and I seek to understand the everyday inductive leaps humans make in computational terms, which we apply to building powerful learning machines.
ZHOU
YU
UC Davis
My research interest is natural language processing. I work on various topics, such as language understanding and generation. I build dialog system that provide effective communications.
RAJESH
RAO
University of Washington
My research interests span computational neuroscience, brain-computer interfaces and artificial intelligence.
PRANAB
DAS
Elon University
TWCF Principal Advisor; DI Initiative
My current research collaborations include a project focusing on the “active matter” found inside living cells. This project brings scientists and philosophers together to consider the implications of this ubiquitous but extraordinary stuff for contemporary approaches to materials and materialism.