Lab Members

Jon Freeman is Associate Professor of Psychology at Columbia University and director of the Social Cognitive & Neural Sciences Lab. His research examines how people understand the social world through a coordination of visual, social, and affective processes. In particular, his work focuses on the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying person perception, bias and stereotyping, and the real-time formation and dynamics of social and emotional judgments, including the interplay between social cognition and visual perception. He takes an integrative and multi-level approach that makes use of techniques such as functional neuroimaging, computational modeling, and behavioral paradigms. He is also the developer of the data collection and analysis software, MouseTracker, which uses response-directed hand motion to uncover split-second decision-making.

Freeman is the recipient of a number of awards, including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Association for Psychological Science’s Janet T. Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions, and early career awards from the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences, the Social & Affective Neuroscience Society, the Society for Personality & Social Psychology, the International Social Cognition Network, and the Society for Social Neuroscience.

Website | CV | Twitter | STEM Diversity

Gabriel Fajardo earned his B.S. in Neuroscience from Boston College and currently serves as the Lab Manager in Dr. Jon Freeman’s lab. During his time at Boston College, he conducted research utilizing multivariate statistical dependence analyses based on neural networks (MVPN) to identify brain regions responsible for audio-visual integration. Building upon his background in computational cognitive neuroscience and his newfound interest in social psychology, Gabe’s current pursuits revolve around the intersection of these fields. He investigates the intricate brain mechanisms that underlie stereotyping and bias. Gabe is also interested in exploring the dynamics of social categorization and intergroup bias, seeking to understand the nuances of why, when, and how we categorize individuals.

Youngki Hong, Ph.D.

Youngki Hong is a postdoctoral research scientist in the Social Cognitive and Neural Sciences Lab at Columbia University. His research investigates how people perceive others and process information about them. He integrates theories and methods from social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and machine learning to explore three main research areas: (1) intergroup bias in person perception, (2) mechanisms of facial stereotyping, and (3) real-world outcomes of stereotyping and prejudice. Before joining the lab, Youngki completed his Ph.D. in Social Psychology at UC Santa Barbara, working with Kyle Ratner.

Website

John Andrew Chwe completed his B.A. in Psychology at New York University in 2019 and is now a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Jon Freeman. He is interested in the interplay between conceptual structures and perception. In particular, he plans on investigating how individuals differ in the granularity of their representations and how this can affect perception and behavior.

Website

Maryam Bin Meshar is a Ph.D. student at NYU working with both Dr. Yaacov Trope and Dr. Jon Freeman. She is interested in understanding the cognitive underpinnings of social perception and judgment, and how these processes are shaped by contextual information.

Margaux Wienk completed her B.Sc. in Psychology and M.Sc. in Social Psychology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam prior to coming to Columbia. She is interested in how people understand and interact with their broader social environment. Her work investigates how people understand ambiguity in person perception and its consequences.

Robert Gruber is a Ph.D. candidate in social psychology at the University of the Arts Berlin and is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Freeman Lab. Robert’s research encompasses the field of clothing psychology, focusing on the psychological mechanisms behind human clothing behavior. In one line of research, he examines the vestimentary communication of perceptually unequivocal and ambiguous category memberships to one’s social environment. In another strain of research, he investigates how the functionalities of attire (e.g., physical protection) may extend to the psychological level. Together with Dr. Jon Freeman, he is exploring a clothing psychological approach to attenuate gender and LGBTQ gaps in STEM.

Francesca Reilly is a senior honors student at Columbia University studying psychology. She works with John Andrew Chwe on projects involving dynamic impression formation and social categorization. She is broadly interested in the intersections between social justice and social neuroscience.

Clare Donaldson is a senior honors student studying psychology at Columbia University. She works with Youngki Hong on projects involving attentional mechanisms of facial stereotyping and social categorization. Currently, she is  interested in the effects of early life adversity on neurobehavioral development.

Cairo Yepez is a senior at Columbia College studying Cognitive Science with a specialization in Social Cognition. He has been working with the Social Cognitive and Neural Sciences Lab since Fall 2022, helping lab members run fMRI scanning experiments. Cairo’s academic interests focus on applied cognitive science, neuroeconomics, and the intersection of theory and therapeutic practices. Outside of the lab, Cairo is an advocate of the Latin American community on campus, with membership in the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in STEM, the Activities Board at Columbia, and Student Organization of Latinos.

Sandra Zelen is a sophomore student at Columbia Engineering, majoring in Computer Science. She works with John Andrew Chwe on projects that explore the connection between cognitive processes and timing, with a specific emphasis on understanding memory mechanisms. Her role mainly involves the coding aspect of the project, ensuring the seamless execution of experimental tasks.

Abigail Roh is a senior at Columbia College studying psychology and creative writing. She joined the Social Cognitive and Neural Sciences Lab in winter 2023 and is interested in trait perception, emotion recognition, and social categorization.

Magan Chin is a senior at Barnard College studying computational neuroscience. She works with John Andrew Chwe on projects involving modeling fMRI data using Generalized Linear Models (GLM) and beta weight maps to understand how representations change with repetitive exposure and familiarity. She is broadly interested in the intersections between cognitive science, behavioral economics, and political science.

Christina (Jin) Capozzoli

Lab Manager
Jin received her B.S. in Neuroscience from the University of Maryland, College Park. At Maryland, she investigated the neural correlates of early-life temperament. Currently, she is broadly interested in moral cognition and prosocial behavior. She hopes to use neuroimaging and behavioral techniques to understand how we use limited information to make judgements about others, and how those perceptions may affect social decision-making.

Website

DongWon Oh, Ph.D.

Postdoc
DongWon Oh received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Princeton University and was advised by Alexander Todorov. DongWon’s research at Princeton focused on how gender biases play out in facial impressions. Expanding his previous work, DongWon is interested in studying how the complex process of impression formation is shaped by the social environment (e.g., stereotypes), the characteristics of the targets (e.g., face identity, face gender), and the characteristics of the perceiver (e.g., perceiver gender).

Website

Kao Chua, Ph.D.

Postdoc
Kao Chua received his Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University and was advised by Isabel Gauthier. His research at Vanderbilt focused on the role of attention and visual expertise on face and object recognition. In particular, he has studied holistic processing, the tendency for experts to process objects as entire wholes rather than by their constituent parts. This tendency is thought to be important for object recognition and is considered a hallmark of expert level processing. His dissertation explored the role of experience on the magnitude of holistic processing and found that learning more exemplars in a category and receiving more training time resulted in greater holistic processing for that category. Kao is interested in bridging the work he has done in perceptual expertise and categorization with social face perception. In 2019, Kao received an NSF SBE Postdoctoral Fellowship to examine the malleability of trait-based attributions, specifically in terms of whether training and experience can influence implicit biases or automatic evaluative judgments. He is also interested in exploring potential individual differences in making these social judgments.

Website

Henna Vartiainen

Lab Manager
Henna Vartiainen received her BSc in Psychology from the University of Glasgow and her MSc in Clinical Neuropsychology from Leiden University. She completed her clinical internship at the Helsinki University Hospital working with addiction psychiatric patients. Her previous research has explored the top-down neural processes that underlie illusory color vision and functional and structural brain alterations in clinical populations. She is broadly interested in the interplay of neural and cognitive top-down mechanisms and bottom-up processes involved in social perception.

Jeff Brooks, Ph.D.

Ph.D. Student
Jeff received his B.A. in Philosophy, with a minor in Cognitive & Brain Sciences, from Tufts University in 2012 and began his Ph.D. in Social Psychology at NYU in 2015. Jeff is interested in the neural mechanisms that support the influence of conceptual knowledge, context, and other top-down factors on social face perception. His current research is focused on the relative influence of facial cues and conceptual knowledge during facial emotion perception, and how individual differences in conceptual knowledge and various social and cultural factors can influence this process.

Website

Annie Hill, Ph.D.

Ph.D. Student
Annie received her B.A. in Psychology from Vassar College in 2012. She began her Ph.D. in Social Psychology at NYU in 2014. Her research broadly concerns how psychological processes entrench intergroup conflict. She is especially interested in identifying prejudice regulation strategies for intergroup contexts in which discrimination is socially acceptable.

Jared Martin, Ph.D.

Postdoc
Jared Martin received his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, advised by Paula Niedenthal. His research explores the bidirectional relationship between the human body and the social world. He adopts a social-functional approach to facial expressions in order to understand how facial expressions regulate perceivers’ minds, bodies, and behaviors. Using techniques from machine learning and cognitive psychology, he explores the content of perceivers’ mental representations of facial expressions, including the facial actions and social judgments perceivers associate with them. In another aspect of his work, he uses psychophysiological and neuroendocrine measures to document the differential biological impact of perceiving various kinds of facial expressions in meaningful social contexts.

Benjy Barnett

Lab Manager
Benjy graduated from Sussex University in 2017. Having studied Neuroscience with Cognitive Science for his BSc, he has just finished a MSc in Intelligent and Adaptive Systems. Working with Dr. Keisuke Suzuki and Professor Anil Seth, his work has been focused on using Virtual Reality to understand the neural and cognitive processes that underlie various aspects of bodily consciousness and hallucinations. Benjy is interested in how the predictions we make about the world can influence our perception. Specifically, he hopes to use computational modelling and psychophysical methodologies to investigate the extent to which top-down beliefs about race and gender can impact our perception, and subsequently alter our behavior toward other people.

Ben Stillerman, Ph.D.

Ph.D. Student
Ben received his B.S. in Cognitive Science from University of California, San Diego and he began his Ph.D. in Social Psychology at NYU in 2015, working with Dr. Jon Freeman and Dr. Dave Amodio. He wants to know how people categorize others and how someone’s membership in various social groups can influence perception of them. He is especially interested in how implicit stereotypes and prejudice alter lower-level visual perception and in finding interventions to mitigate the effects of intergroup bias.

Ryan Stolier, Ph.D.

Ph.D. Student
Ryan was a doctoral student in the Department of Psychology at New York University, where he worked with Dr. Jon Freeman in the Social Cognitive and Neural Sciences Lab. His research bridges methods of psychology and neuroscience to study person perception, social categorization, and stereotyping. In particular, he examines how the structure of our social concepts and beliefs shape our perceptions of others. He is now a postdoc at Columbia with Kevin Ochsner.

Azaadeh Goharzad

Master’s Student
Azaadeh received her M.A. in Behavioral Neuroscience from the City University of New York in 2017. She is interested in the reciprocal relationship between low level visual perception and intergroup relations—specifically, how visual perception of groups and individual group members may be influenced by social factors such as discrepancies in power, threat, social identity, and vice versa. She is also interested in how these perceptual experiences ultimately contribute to behaviors in the context of intergroup conflict and collective action. She is now a Ph.D. student at the University of Delaware with Peter Mende-Siedlecki.

Xi Shen

Master’s Student
Xi was a master’s student at NYU, majoring in Psychology. She worked in the lab as a research assistant and is interested in face perception and its role in social cognitive processes. She is currently a Ph.D. student at Cornell University.

Xuan Zhang

Lab Manager
Xuan received her A.B. in Mathematics, cum laude, Nutrition and Health minor, from Cornell University in 2014. She worked as an undergraduate research assistant in the Laboratory of Rational Decision Making with Dr. Reyna. She served as lab manager from 2014–2016 in the Freeman Lab. She is now pursuing her Ph.D. at Columbia.

Eric Hehman, Ph.D.

Postdoc
Eric is now an Assistant Professor of Psychology at McGill University.

DJ Lick, Ph.D.

Postdoc
DJ is now a User Experience Researcher at Facebook.

Zach Ingbretsen

Lab Manager
Zach graduated from Dartmouth College in 2011 with an A.B. in Neuroscience with honors. After graduating, he was lab manager for Catherine Norris’ social neuroscience lab, and then lab manager / research technician / software development assistant extraordinaire in Jon Freeman’s lab. He is currently a research technician / software engineer in Mina Cikara’s lab at Harvard.

Ryan Tracy

Master’s Student
Ryan was an M.A. student, having graduated from the University of North Carolina Wilmington with a B.A. in Psychology in 2013. He's interested in how people make automatic judgments about the morality of other individuals and how group membership modulates this effect. He is now a Ph.D. student at the CUNY Graduate Center working with Steven Young.