Emily Silver studies behavioral and psychophysiological responses to early life stress and childhood trauma. In particular, she examines how both individual and contextual factors shape differences in social and emotional development following adverse experiences. Her current work focuses on topics such as environmental unpredictability in early childhood, violence exposure and loneliness, and the impact of social stress on personal memories. She is dedicated to promoting healthy development in children, and her work has involved numerous collaborations with community partners.
Casey Ferrara's research focuses on language and cognition through studies of speech, sign language, and gesture. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2024, and her graduate research explored the ways in which communicating visually (through gesture or a signed language) impacts the way in which we represent different kinds of information. She also studies how this differs between adults fluent in a language and children still acquiring a language. Prior work has investigated the connection between language and cognition through studies of implicature and pragmatics, as well as language impairment in individuals with post-stroke aphasia.
Her website detailing her work is caseyferrara.com.
Professor Bai studies dynamic social minds. Broadly, she explores the interplay between individual decision processes and societal phenomena in the field of social cognition. She investigates how individuals adaptively but selectively construct their social world and how the constructed social world, in turn, shapes individual minds.
Read more about Professor Bai here.
Tess Fulcher studies how infants and toddlers learn about the world around them through exploration and social interaction. Particularly, Fulcher is interested in how early individual differences cascade into later shifts in other developmental areas. Current work focuses on the development of children's help-seeking as a problem-solving strategy, using in-person, online, and archival data across multiple age points. Prior work has investigated relations between children’s early motor abilities and later social cognition.
Lydia Emery's work examines romantic relationships, social class, and identity. She studies how social class influences both the challenges and strengths that people bring to their closest relationships.
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A leader in the study of happiness, psychological well-being, the experience of a meaningful life and cultural psychology, Oishi’s research program is distinctive in its methodological range and ingenuity as well as its broad theoretical reach. Currently, he is focused on the effects of economic inequality and residential mobility on the well-being of individuals and communities. Oishi earned his bachelor's degree from International Christian University in Tokyo, his master’s from Columbia University and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Read more about Professor Oishi here.
Lin Bian's research examines the development of social cognition, with an emphasis on children’s reasoning about social categories. In this vein, she has pursued two major lines of research: One line of work focuses on the acquisition and consequences of stereotypes about social groups for children’s interests and motivation. The other line of work focuses on infants’ and toddlers’ sociomoral expectations, especially as how they apply to behaviors within vs. across group boundaries.
Before moving to the University of Chicago, she was the Evalyn Edwards Milman Assistant Professor at Cornell University.
Read more about Professor Bian here.
Yuan Chang Leong’s research examines the different ways in which goals, desires and needs affect how people perceive and respond to our environment. His work draws from the traditions of cognitive neuroscience, social psychology and affective science.
Read more about Professor Leong here.
Professor Yu’s research aims to understand the neurophysiological mechanisms that enable the creation of knowledge from individual experiences, specifically focusing on how activity coordination across multiple brain regions contribute to these processes. Read more about his work here.