Research Opportunities
Bringing cognitive science students and researchers together for collaboration helps expand our understanding of cognition and supports the field’s growth and prominence.
If you would like to list openings at your lab or other research-related events, please email Professor Melinh Lai at melinh@uchicago.edu.
Research is the heart of an interdisciplinary field such as cognitive science. Below is a list of research labs spanning the core disciplines of the Cognitive Science Major that students may contact for research opportunities. Click the name of each lab to open its website in a new tab.
Awh Vogel Lab
Director: Ed Awh and Ed Vogel
Contact: awhvogellab@gmail.com
Research interests: working memory, attention, electrophysiology
Bakkour Memory and Decision Lab
Director: Akram Bakkour
Email: bakkourlab@uchicago.edu; RA interest form
Research interests: memory, decision-making, fMRI, eye tracking, computational modeling
Daniel Bartels
Contact: bartels@uchicago.edu
Research interests: Judgment and Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, Moral Psychology, Concepts and Categories
Brain Bridge Lab
Director: Wilma Bainbridge
Contact: brainbridgelab@gmail.com
Research interests: visual memory, memorability, scene perception, face memory, real-world memory
Chatter Lab
Director: Maria Casillas
Contact: mcasillas@uchicago.edu
Research interests: language development; interactional pragmatics; conversation; cross-cultural comparison
Shereen Chaudhry
Contact: chauds@chicagobooth.edu
Research interests: social interactions and relationships, language and speech, game theory, conflict management, negotiations, teamwork, customer satisfaction
Conceptualization Lab
Director: Ari Holtaman
Email: aholtaman@uchicago.edu
Research interests: conceptualizing LLMs, predictive interpretability, generative models of human media
Data Cognition Lab
Director: Alex Kale
Contact: kalea@uchicago.edu
Research interests: design of data visualization & analysis, inferences, decisions, and value judgments
Development of Social Cognition Lab
Director: Katherine Kinzler
Contact: iramkissoon@uchicago.edu (contact lab manager Isabella Ramkissoon)
Research interests: development of social cognition, accent attitudes
Freedman Lab
Director: David J. Freedman
Contact: dfreedman@uchicago.edu
Research interests: Neural circuit mechanisms of vision and cognition
Goldin-Meadow Lab
Director: Susan Goldin-Meadow
Contact: sgm@uchicago.edu
Research interests: creating language, learning language, co-speech gesture, silent gesture
Hatsopoulos Lab
Director: Nicholas Hatsopoulos
Email: nicho@uchicago.edu
Research interests: cortical basis of motor control and learning, motor behavior encoding & representation in the brain, multi-electrode arrays, mathematical modeling
Human-Robot Interaction Lab
Director: Sarah Sebo
Contact: sarahsebo@uchicago.edu
Research interests: human-robot interaction
Language, Events, and Mind (LEM) Lab
Director: Monica L. Do
Contact: RA interest form
Research interests: psycholinguistics, language production, event cognition, sentence production, experimental linguistics
Language Processing Lab
Director: Ming Xiang
Contact: mxiang@uchicago.edu
Research interests: language processing (syntactic parsing, semantic and pragmatics processing), neuroscience of language, working memory, language variation and change
Memory and Perception in Schizophrenia (MAPS) Lab
Director: Molly Erickson
Contact: RA interest form
Research interests: Visual working memory and perception in people with schizophrenia and other forms of serious mental illness
Mina Lee
Contact: mnlee@uchicago.edu
Research interests: writing with AI, human-AI interaction, natural language processing
Motivation and Cognition Neuroscience Lab
Director: Yuan Chang Leong
Contact: RA interest form (scroll to undergraduate section)
Research interests: Cognitive Neuroscience, Motivation, Emotion, Decision-Making, Computational Modeling, Natural Language Processing
Neurophysiology of experience, memory, and knowledge
Director: Jai Yu
Contact: jaiyu@uchicago.edu
Research interests: Learning and memory, Neural circuits, Behavior, Hippocampus, Prefrontal cortex, neural oscillations
Phonology Lab
Director: Alan Yu
Contact: aclyu@uchicago.edu
Research interests: Speech processing and speech production, the nature of linguistic representation, language variation and change
Sign Language Lab
Director: Diane Brentari
Contact: dbrentari@uchicago.edu
Research interests: sign languages, gesture, language emergence, phonology, morphology
Stephanie Smith
Contact: stephanie.smith@chicagobooth.edu
Research interests: decision making, eye-tracking, mouse-tracking, computational modeling, consumer behavior
Social cognitive neuroscience laboratory
Director: Jean Decety
Contact: decety@uchicago.edu
Research interests: behavioral economics, developmental psychology, emotion and empathy, functional and structural neuroimaging, morality and social decision-making, political psychology and neuroscience, psychopathy, social neuroscience, social norms
Speech Perception and Production Lab
Director: Melissa Baese-Berk
Contact: mmbb@uchicago.edu
Research interests: phonology, phonetics, speech perception, speech production, second language acquisition
Abigail Sussman
Contact: asussman@chicagobooth.edu
Research interests: judgment and decision making, financial well-being, behavior change, corporate social responsibility