Prof. Anne GE Collins

Contact: annecollins@berkeley.edu

I am an Associate Professor in the department of Psychology and a member of the The Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley.

Previously, I was a post-doctoral research associate at Brown University, in the Laboratory of Neural Computation and Cognition (LNCC), with Prof. Michael Frank. I studied math and science at Ecole Polytechnique (Palaiseau, France) as an undergrad, then got my PhD in Cognitive Science from UPMC (Paris, France), with Prof. Etienne Koechlin, at the laboratory for cognitive neuroscience (ENS, INSERM). You can find a full cv here.

Postdoctoral Researchers

Daniel Ehrlich

Contact: dbehrlich@berkeley.edu

I earned my Ph.D. at Yale University working in the Division of Neurocognition, Neurocomputation, and Neurogenetics under the supervision of Dr. John D. Murray. My work there utilized human behavioral assays, machine learning approaches and normative modeling to investigate the ways in which humans and artificial agents dealt with acquiring and performing multiple tasks in parallel. I was especially interested in ways in which deep learning could be utilized to provide insight behind the algorithmic and implementation level solutions to cognitive problems. In the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab I hope to use those methods to understand how humans identify, consolidate and utilize complex multi-stage action plans.

Chiara Caldinelli

Contact: chiarac@berkeley.edu

I received a bachelor’s in cognitive science and master’s in neuroscience from University of Padua, Italy, and then became a qualified psychologist, with the aim to bridge neuroscience and developmental psychology. During my PhD at Trinity College Dublin I worked with infants and used neuroimaging to uncover the developmental mechanisms of brain areas supporting learning and higher cognition. I am now investigating the role of the thalamus in executive functions.

Graduate Students

Gaia Molinaro

Contact: gaiamolinaro@berkeley.edu
Website: gaiamolinaro.github.io

I earned my BSc in Neuroscience from King’s College London and my MSc in Cognitive and Decision Sciences from UCL, where I worked at Tali Sharot’s Affective Brain Lab. At Berkeley, I hope to take a computational approach to understand how people learn complex tasks from sparse rewards, how they set and achieve their own goals, and how different cognitive functions work together to enable these processes.

Jing-Jing Li

Contact: jl3676@berkeley.edu
Website: jl3676.github.io

I graduated from Cornell University in 2020 with majors in Computer Science and Math. Before joining the PhD program in Neuroscience at Berkeley in 2021, I had worked in the labs of Dr. Colin Camerer, Dr. Daphne Bavelier, and Dr. Hal Blumenfeld. My research in the CCN lab focuses on answering the question: how do humans flexibly generalize or transfer existing knowledge to new contexts? More specifically, I use behavioral experiments and computational modeling to study human structure learning and transfer behavior under the framework of hierarchical reinforcement learning and decision-making. At the end of the day, I hope to help understand human intelligence and use this knowledge to build smarter machines. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you’d like to connect!

Sarah Oh

Contact: sarahoh@berkeley.edu

I graduated with a BA in Engineering Sciences at Dartmouth College, where I stayed to learn more about artificial intelligence and build research experience as an MS student. I spent 2 years as a research assistant in John O’Doherty’s lab at Caltech. My research interests lie broadly in the computational processes that set human intelligence apart from that of other animals and artificial agents. At Anne’s lab, I hope to develop computational models that can teach us about how people acquire and flexibly adapt the representations and policies they use to guide behavior.

Ti-Fen Pan

Contact: tfpan@berkeley.edu

I earned my MSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. After graduating, I spent a couple of years in the tech industry as a software engineer while working voluntarily for physiological data analysis at the Neuroscape lab at the University of California, San Francisco. Now my interests lie primarily in understanding the individual learning differences with computational modeling and deep learning methods.

Lab Manager

Garrett Chao

Contact: garrettchao@berkeley.edu

I graduated from Dartmouth College with a double major in Neuroscience and Psychology. During my undergraduate studies, I contributed as a research assistant in two labs: the Stöermer Lab, where I used EEG to investigate visual illusions and attention, and the Lee Lab, where I studied cytoskeletal dynamics in budding yeast. At the CCN Lab, I hope to deepen my understanding of the neural mechanisms that underly learning, memory, and decision-making, as well as gain further insight into the research process.

Postgraduate Lab Alumni

Milena Rmus (Graduate Student - now Postdoctoral Researcher at Helmholtz Institute)
Beth Baribault (Postdoctoral Researcher)
Aspen H. Yoo (Postdoctoral Researcher - now doing art)
Jimmy Xia (Graduate Student - now at The D. E. Shaw Group)
Maria Eckstein (Graduate Student, Postdoctoral Researcher - now at DeepMind)
Sam McDougle (Postdoctoral Researcher - now Assistant Professor at Yale)

Undergraduate/RA Lab Alumni

Amy Zou (Lab Manager - now MS Student at UW)
Soobin Hong (Undergraduate Research Assistant - now PhD Student at John Hopkins University)
Flora Dong (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Daniela Muñoz-Lopez (Undergraduate Honors Student)
Josie Christon (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Philip Papapolyzos (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Tory Benson (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Christina Su (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
May Liu (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Kyle Giffin (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Joy Chang (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Aram Moghaddassi (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Hannah Kim (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Yi Liu (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Kshitiz Gupta (Undergraduate Research Assistant - now at NVIDIA)
Amanda Felty (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Femke Delissen (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Helen Lu (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Ham Huang (Undergraduate Honors Student - now Lab Manager at the Jenkins Lab at UPenn)
Vy Pham (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Eliana Shaulson (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Sabrina Ni (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Sarah Master (Lab Manager - now PhD Student at NYU)
William Ryan (Post-Baccalaureate - now PhD Student at UC Berkeley)
Nora Harhen (Undergraduate Honors Student - now PhD Student at UC Irvine)
Haley Keglovits (Undergraduate Honors Student - now PhD student at Brown University)
Lucy Whitmore (Undergraduate Honors Student - now Lab Manager at DBIC Lab at University of Oregon)
Zisu Dong (Undergraduate Research Assistant - now at Facebook AI)
Justin Morillo (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Lucy Eletel (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Nithya Rajakumar (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Katya Brooun (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Wendy Shi (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Zoe Temple (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Rachel Arsenault (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Avanti Mehrotra (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Lucy Eletel (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Nithya Rajakumar (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Daniel Scott (Intern - now in the Lab for Neural Computation and Cognition (LNCC) at Brown University)
Julie Liu (Research Assistant)
Talia Welte (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Tanya Smith (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Ching Fang (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Gayatri Sabne (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Benjamin Tang (Undergraduate Research Assistant)