Principal Investigator

Post Docs

Changrun Huang

Changrun earned his Bachelor of Engineering from Guangdong University of Technology and completed a Master of Education in Psychology at South China Normal University. He went on to pursue a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, under the supervision of Jan Theeuwes and Mieke Donk. His doctoral research examined how prior learning experiences shape attentional selection.

His research interests focus on the adaptation of cognitive control in response to historical learning experiences. He is currently investigating the challenges of resolving imperative yet anticipated conflicts through cognitive control.

Merve Ileri Tayar

Merve earned her B.A. in Psychology from TOBB ETU and her M.S. from Middle East Technical University in Türkiye. She earned her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis, under the supervision of Dr. Julie Bugg.

Her research focuses on how people learn to adapt cognitive control to the demands of their environment and changing goals. She is interested in how people learn to allocate attention based on experience, how rewards shape the acquisition and deployment of cognitive control, and how learned control settings transfer across situations. More recently, she investigates the interplay between stability and flexibility in cognitive control, including when these dimensions can be independently modulated and how people maintain effective control while adapting to changing demands. Using behavioral and computational approaches, her work seeks to understand the mechanisms that support adaptive and flexible cognitive control.

Graduate Students

Jaime Rios

Jaime graduated from UC, Davis in 2021 with a B.A. in Psychology and Sociology, where he studied metascience with Dr. Simine Vazire. He later worked as a research coordinator at Stanford University, researching cognitive control with Dr. Patrick Bissett and Dr. Russ Poldrack. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience, working with Dr. Tobias Egner.

Jaime is interested in understanding the neural mechanisms involved in switching between internal and external attentional foci. He uses both behavioral and neuroimaging methodologies to understand the relationship between perception and memory.

Yifei Wu

Yifei graduated from Lawrence University in 2026 with a B.A. in Psychology and Neuroscience. She is currently a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Tobias Egner and is interested in how the brain balances cognitive stability and flexibility and how these processes interact with attention and memory. She is interested in using behavioral, EEG, and neuroimaging methods to investigate these control dynamics and their underlying neural mechanisms.

Alumni

Roshni Ammanamanchi - Graduate Student, William James College

Candice Wang - Senior Researcher, Center for Responsible Lending

Raphael Geddert - Senior Associate Data Scientist, Gilead Sciences

Brooke Sevchik - Data Analyst, University of Pennsylvania

Eva Gjorgieva - Management Consultant, McKinsey & Company  

Audrey Liu - Postdoctoral Fellow, George Washington University

Jasmin Stein - Ph.D. student, TU Dresden, Dresden, DE

Peter Whitehead - Associate Director, Data Science, Merck, USA

Sam Verschooren - Postdoctoral Scholar, Humboldt University, Berlin, DE

Tanya Wen - Applied Perception Scientist, Meta Reality Labs

Nick Brosowsky - Assistant Professor, University of Manitoba, Canada

Rafael Cruz - Data Scientist, UW Madison, USA

Christina Bejjani - Senior Data Scientists, ChowNow, USA

Jack Dolgin - Graduate Student, Washington University in St. Louis, USA

Ziwei Zhang - Graduate Student, University of Chicago, USA

Yu-Chin Chiu - Assistant Professor, Purdue University, USA

Anthony Sali - Assistant Professor, Wake Forest University, USA

Amelia M. Abbott-Frey - MD Candidate, Columbia University Medical School, USA

Hanna Oh Descher - Senior Data Scientist, Apple, USA

Paul Muhle-Karbe - Postdoctoral Scholar, Oxford University, UK & Stanford University, USA

Jiefeng Jiang - Associate Professor (Tenured), University of Iowa, USA

Emma Wu Dowd - Senior Research Program Coordinator, The University of Texas at Austin, USA

Anastasia Kiyonaga - Assistant Professor, University of California, San Diego, USA

Franziska Korb - Postdoctoral Scholar & Lecturer, Dresden University of Technology, Germany

Joseph King - Postdoctoral Scholar, Dresden University of Technology, Germany

Darinka Trübutschek - Postdoctoral Scholar, Oxford University, UK