RuCCS Students

Welcome to the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science

News, research achievements that are notable, individual recognitions, student recognitions, grants , any other initiatives

Here we can have a few sentences about this course and also a description of its major research achievements

Current Students

Ryne Choi
Serena DeStefani
Nathan Destler
Xiaoli He
Nicholas Kleene
Brian McMahan
Jason Rubinstein
Ji Ryu
Yelda Semizer
Jie Wang

Alumni

Computer Science:

	Bethany Leffler is on the faculty at the British Columbia Institute of Technology in the Computer Systems Technology Program.
	Kevin Sanik, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., is a 5th year student in the Computer Science department. Kevin received his B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Purdue University. During his studies he started his (soon to be) career in research through the Psychology Department, spurring his choices in his field of study. He is interested in computer vision and modeling human vision, and is working with Doug DeCarlo.
	Edinah Koffi Gnang is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study.
	Ari Weinstein is a Postdoctoral Fellow
	Polina Yanovich, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., is a 2nd year graduate student in Computer Science. She graduated from Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology in 2006 with a B.S. in Computer Science. She is interested in visual perception, computer vision, and how understanding of human visual perception can help to improve human-computer interaction. She is working with Doug DeCarlo on artistic rendering but keeps an eye open for other interesting research opportunities as well. She likes horse riding and sailing and tries to improve her artistic skills whenever she has time for it.

Psychology:

	Erica Briscoeis a Research Scientist at Georgia Tech Research Institute working on models of behavioral processes for individuals and groups, visual and machine perception, and human concept learning and categorization. She is also interested in alternate uses for social media, and co-led a team that placed second in DARPA’s Network Challenge.
	Steven Cholewiak, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., is a 5th year student in Cognitive Psychology. He is working with Manish Singh, Jacob Feldman, and Doug DeCarlo. Steve received his B.A. from the University of Virginia with majors in Psychology and Physics. After graduation, he worked for a year at the Haptic Interface Research Laboratory at Purdue University with Dr. Hong Tan conducting haptics research. His research interests include cutaneous and visual perception, haptics and human-machine interfaces, and modeling of cognitive processes. While he was born and raised in central New Jersey, Steve tries to find time to travel and visit fun and exciting places around the country and world. He also loves cooking (and eating) new and interesting foods.
	Kristina Denisova is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Columbia University.
	Vicky Froyen, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., is a 3rd year student in Cognitive Psychology with a Fulbright Honorary Scholarship. He received his B.A. and M.A. in Psychology from the K.U.Leuven in Belgium. His master thesis on rhythmic timing of movements was done under the supervision of Dr. Ralf Krampe. Currently, Vicky is working with Dr. Jacob Feldman on computational models and empirical studies on figure-ground interpretation. This work is done in further collaboration with Dr. Manish Singh and Dr. Johan Wagemans (K.U.Leuven).
	Gabriel Greenberg is an Assistant Professor at UCLA.
	Harry Haroutioun Haladjian is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Université de Franche-Comté, Laboratoire de Psychologie.
	Nora Isacoff, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., is a 4th year student in Cognitive Psychology, working with Karin Stromswold in the Language Acquisition and Processing Lab. Nora is interested in the relationship between lexical meaning and concepts, the development of lexical access abilities, and especially the hierarchical structure of the lexicon, and she enjoys approaching her work from an interdisciplinary perspective. Nora presented her work at several conferences including The American Psychological Association, The Eastern Psychological Association, and the American Psychological Society. Nora has a B. A. in linguistics from University College London. In addition to taking classes in psychology, linguistics, philosophy and computer science, Nora enjoys singing in the Voorhees Choir at the Mason Gross School of the Arts.
	Aaron Kheifets, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., is a 3rd year student in Cognitive Psychology. He is working with Randy Gallistel and Jacob Feldman. Aaron received his Bachelor's from Reed College in math and philosophy. Aaron's interests lie in probabilistic inference, concept learning and referring to himself in the third person. Before beginning his PhD program at Rutgers, he worked in the labs of Randy Gallistel and Rochel Gelman on numerical learning, and is extremely grateful to them for helping him find a home here at RUCCS. In his spare time, Aaron enjoys playing accordion and ukulele poorly. You have been warned.
	Melissa Kibbe is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University.
	Peter Pantelis, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., is a 4th year student in Cognitive Psychology, working with Jacob Feldman. Peter received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania with majors in psychology and political science, and performed his undergraduate research on face-name association with Dr. Michael Kahana. He is currently exploring how people infer the mental states of animate objects in the world, using their motion as a cue. Peter is quite proud to have been born and raised in beautiful New Jersey.
	Kimele Persaud
	Gwendolyn Rehrig, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., is a 3rd year student in the Cognitive Psychology program working with Karin Stromswold. She graduated from Lehigh University in 2011 having completed a B.S. in Cognitive Psychology and a minor in Biological Sciences. She is interested in the lexical semantics of verbs, the organization of verbs in the lexicon, the syntactic properties of verbs, and how events as perceived or experienced by observers correspond to verbal events.
	Nick Ross, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., is a 4th year student in the Cognitive Psychology program. He received a B.A. in Psychology from Stockton College in New Jersey ('08). He is working with Dr. Eileen Kowler on how different streams of information, presented in either the same or different modalities, are integrated during a divided attention task.
	Elio Santos, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., is a 4th student working with Dr. Eileen Kowler. He is interested in eye movements and visual perception. Elio went to Hunter College of the City University of NY for his undergraduate studies and majored in psychology and minored in biological sciences.
	Daglar Tanrikulu
	John Wilder is a Postdoctoral Fellow
	Chia-Chien Wu, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., is a 3rd year student working with Dr. Eileen Kowler. He received his B.S. in Psychology from National Taiwan University in 2005. Chia-Chien is interested in visual perception, action, and eye movements. He is currently working on the speed accuracy trade-off and saccadic planning.
	Min Zhao, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., is a 3rd year student in Cognitive Psychology. She is currently working with Dr. Eileen Kowler, studying visual attention, perception and eye movements. She is also interested in the Human Factors and Ergonomics issues. Min graduated from Zhejiang University in China with a B.S. in psychology and a certificate in ITP (Intensive Training Program of Innovation and Entrepreneurship).

What about?

Xiaohua Zhung
Rachel Sparks
Chris Mansley
Sung-Ho Kim
Gaurav Kharkwal
Timothy Gerstner

Computer Science

Dr. Chung-chieh (Ken) Shan

I work to tap into and enhance the amazing human ability to create concepts, combine concepts, and share concepts, by lining up formal representations and what they represent.Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

* No longer at Rutgers

Personal Website
Dr. Doug DeCarlo

My main interests are in the cognitive science of visual interaction: I explore how accounts of human perception and communication can inform computer systems that engage in natural and effective visual presentation. My recent projects in computer graphics have focused on shape depiction in line drawings, meaningful abstraction in images, and conversational animation.Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

* No longer at Rutgers
Matthew Stone

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Dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
ON ADMINISTRATIVE LEAVE

Reasoning systems for natural language generation and human-computer interaction; formal models of plans, context and mutual knowledge, and linguistic meaning and interpretation.

Intelligent Systems
Vladimir Pavlovic

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Bayesian system modeling, time-series analysis, and statistical computer vision; modeling of human emotions and affect, as well as design of fast, robust, face tracking and identification systems; modeling and analysis of human crowd behavior from the perspective of distributed sensing and decision making systems
Konstantinos Michmizos

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Basic Research: Computational Modeling of Sensorimotor Behavior, Psychophysics, Functional Neuroimaging

Applied research: Rehabilitation Games for children with disabilities, Robotic Neurorehabilitation
Ahmed Elgammal

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Computer Vision and Machine Learning; statistical models for learning visual manifolds of objects; computational models for recognition of articulated objects; computational art history.
Kostas Bekris

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Motion and task planning for autonomous robots; Integration of perception and planning for manipulating and interacting with the physical world; Coordination of multiple physical agents, including human-robot interaction.
Mubbasir Kapadia

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Agent-centric models for simulating crowd dynamics that challenge foundational assumptions in crowd modeling, while providing solutions that are validated using comparisons to real data, and virtual reality experiments; solutions can be used to optimize the behavioral dynamics of real crowds and model the relationships between crowd flow and environment features, with applications in predictive analytics and crowd management, and environment layout design
Dimitris Metaxas

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American Sign Language and Gesture recognition from video, human identification and intent recognition from video, human computer interaction, shape and motion representation for recognition

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Dr. Laleh Najafizadeh

Functional Brain Imaging, Brain Connectivity, Diffuse Optical Brain Imaging, Electroencephalography, Cognitive Rehabilitation, Circuit Design and Microelectronics, Ultra Low-Power Circuits for Biomedical Applications, Data Converters, System on Chip, Wireless IC DesignEmail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Detailed Info Page
Kristin Dana

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Computer vision and graphics; computational models for object appearance and image texture with applications in pattern recognition and scene rendering; optical systems for measurements of surface appearance. Professor Kristin Dana joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1999. Her research interests include computer vision, robotics, AI, computational photography, and machine learning.

Psychology

Kasia M. Bieszczad

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Neurobiology of learning and memory. Applies epigenetic, molecular, and electrophysiological techniques in animals to understand the basis of associative learning and memory determined by behavior; combines sensory neurophysiology (in the auditory system) with behavioral neuroscience to study how memory and perception intertwine.
Jacob Feldman

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Formal, computational and empirical studies of categorization, shape representation, grouping and perceptual inference in visual perception.
Pernille Hemmer

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Professor, Graduate Director, Co-Director
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The influence of prior knowledge on memory and decision making in naturalistic environments.
Zenon Pylyshyn - In Memoriam

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In Zenon's words: "Before moving to Rutgers I was at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, where I was professor in the departments of Psychology, Computer Science, Philosophy and Electrical Engineering and supervised graduate students in all these departments. I joined the Rutgers Psychology Department in 1991 and, at the request of the provost and the dean of the faculty of Arts and Science, established the Center for Cognitive Science (known as RuCCS, and pronounced /ruckus/) which I directed until 1997 before returning to full-time research. I have done research on, and have written about mental imagery, visual attention and cognitive architecture. Some of this work is thought to be of interest to philosophy as well as psychology. Some of my studies are visual attention and pre-attentive location indexing with application to visual tracking, perceptual- motor coordination, and teleoperation; empirical constraints on cognitive architecture, especially for imagery."
Eileen Kowler - In Memoriam

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Study of the sensory cues, spatial representations and cognitive factors that guide patterns of smooth and saccadic eye.

Perceptual Science Website
John P. McGann

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Neurophsyiological, behavioral, and theoretical methods to explore how humans and rodent models learn information about the world; applications to the neural processing of incoming sensory stimuli; how dysfunction in these processes could manifest in mental and neurological disorders
Melchi Michel

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Study of visual search and saccadic eye movements, short-term visual memory, perceptual learning and cue integration. Formal computational and ideal observer modeling of visual tasks and of population coding in visual cortex
Manish Singh

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Formal and empirical study of visual object and surface representations. Part-based description of object shape; Computation of surface structure under partial occlusion and transparency; Visual attention.
Karin Stromswold

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Language acquisition and learnability theory; the cognitive and neural bases of language, language acquisition, and language processing; studies of sentence processing using neuroimaging.
Elizabeth Torres

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Autism; voluntary actions in general and the emergence of symbolic intelligence from them; natural voluntary arm movements in the context of reaching for and grasping an object, obstacle avoidance, the acquisition and retrieval of a motor program, and more recently on the performance of a parietal patient and of patients with Parkinson's disease
David Vicario

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Neuroethology. Using behavioral, neurophysiological, and anatomical methods in songbirds to study sensory and motor processes that subserve vocal learning, including auditory memory, perception, and production of learned vocalizations.
Jenny Wang

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Assistant Professor
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How we master complicated concepts (such as mathematics), and how we learn about the world around us
Qiong Zhang

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Assistant Professor
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Combining computational modeling, behavioral methods and neural imaging to understand human memory; how the human memory system uses its limited cognitive resources to efficiently retrieve past experiences and knowledge, and how we as researchers can design methods to improve human memory performance

Anthropology

Dr. Lee Cronk

My main interest is in the role of culture in the evolution of human behavior. I use a framework based on animal signaling theory to explore such topics as mate choice, cooperation, the relationship between culture and behavior, and cross-cultural differences and similarities in perception and aesthetic judgments. I recently assembled a team of behavioral ecologists and computer scientists to study dance as a courtship signal, using motion capture animation to separate dancers’ movements from their outward appearance.Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Detailed Info Page

Rutgers: Newark

Dr. Maggie Shiffrar

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* No longer at Rutgers

Biomedical Engineering

RWJ Medical School

Perceptual Science integrates computational modeling and experiments across Psychology and Computer Science, with contributions from Linguistics, Philosophy and Neuroscience as well.

The interdisciplinary Perceptual Science core was formed in 2006 with the support of an Integrative Graduate Education and Training Program (IGERT) from the National Science Foundation. The program supported more than 25 trainees, with graduates going on to careers in academics and industry. Perceptual Science remains a major component of research and training at RuCCS, with active collaborations and frequent seminars and colloquia, as well as the annual RuCCS Perceptual and Cognitive Science Forum.

Graduate students are encouraged to take advantage of the opportunities for training in both Computer Science and Psychology, and to embark on collaborative research across these areas. Opportunities are also available for interdisciplinary team projects with fellow students by taking the novel course Integrative Methods in Perceptual Science, developed with support from NSF.

News Channel

Undergraduate Researchers Present First‑Author Posters at EPA 2026

Four undergraduate students from Prof. Karin Stromswold’s Language Acquisition and Processing lab recently traveled to Boston Massachusetts to present their research at the Eastern Psychological...
How Gender Bias Influences Math Education

Prof. Jenny Wang at Rutgers’ Cognition and Learning Center leads study uncovering how gender bias influences math education with her students Kathleen Cracknell (Doctoral student) and Julia Hauss...
Celebrating Excellence: RuCCS Faculty Win CogSci Mind Challenge

The Cognitive Science Society has announced the winners of the 2025 Mind Challenge, and we are proud to share that Dr. Ryan Rhodes, Dr. Shannon Bryant, and Dr. Sten Knutsen from the Center for...
Rutgers Symposium on Learning IV

Rutgers Symposium on Learning IV On Sunday, November 9th, We celebrated the influential career of Dr. Alan Leslie with a star studded lineup of invited speakers across disciplines. Click here for...
Tracking Tiny Facial Movements Can Reveal Subtle Emotions in Autistic Individuals

A Rutgers-led study examines how detecting microscopic facial movements, previously overlooked, are key to enhancing emotional recognition in autistic individuals. A study led by Rutgers...
RuCCS NTT Faculty Ryan Rhodes won 1st place in the CogSci Mind Challenge

Dr. Ryan Rhodes is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. He won 1st place 🥇 in the 2024 CogSci Mind Challenge hosted at the Cognitive Science...
Professor Torres has published a new book by Elsevier Academic Press entitled, "Autism Autonomy:...

Her book provides a new and unifying methodological framework and discusses machine learning and biometrics techniques to diagnose, characterize, and treat patterns of sensory motor control...
RuCCS Post Doctoral Associate, James Preston Lennon’s paper “Are Phenomenal Theories of Thought...

Congratulations to James Preston Lennon, a RuCCS Post Doctoral Associate whose research paper, “Are Phenomenal Theories of Thought Chauvinistic? “ was published in a July 2024 issue of the American...