Five UChicago Scholars Awarded Sloan Fellowships in 2024, including Asst. Prof. Wilma Bainbridge

This article is adapted from UChicago News. Learn about the other faculty receiving Sloan Fellowships and read the full article here.
 

Five University of Chicago scholars have earned prestigious Sloan Research Fellowships, which recognize early-career scholars’ potential to make substantial contributions to their fields. The 2024 Sloan fellows from UChicago include Wilma A. Bainbridge, Kilian Huber, Yuehaw Khoo, Chong Liu and Sunyoung Park.

Awarded since 1955 to the brightest young scientists across the United States and Canada, the two-year Sloan Fellowships are one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career researchers. This year’s winners, announced Feb. 20, will receive two-year fellowships in the amount of $75,000 to further their innovative research.
 

Wilma A. Bainbridge is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology.

Her research focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of perception and memory, looking at how certain items are intrinsically more memorable than others.

She finds that there are certain images—photographs and even faces—that are remembered by most people, and some that are globally forgotten.

In her Brain Bridge Lab, she uses behavioral experiments, computer vision, machine learning, online studies, and functional MRI to understand what makes an item intrinsically memorable, and how the brain processes these items differently.

She also explores the visual content of memories, using drawings and functional MRI to decode memory content.

She received her B.A. in cognitive science from Yale University and her Ph.D. in brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She then completed postdoctoral training at the National Institute of Mental Health before coming to UChicago in 2020.