COGNITIVE - Key Persons


Abdul-Rahim Deeb

Job Titles:
  • Postdoctoral Fellow for the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

Adamantios Gafos

Job Titles:
  • Advisor

Alan Yuille

Job Titles:
  • Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science & Computer Science
Dr. Yuille is a mathematician and computer scientist interested in the biology of vision. His research spans several disciplines including computer vision, vision science, and neuroscience. Alan Yuille received a BA degree in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1976. His PhD on theoretical physics, supervised by Prof. S.W. Hawking, was approved in 1981. He was a research scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT and the Division of Applied Sciences at Harvard University from 1982 to 1988. He served as an assistant and associate professor at Harvard until 1996. He was a senior research scientist at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute from 1996 to 2002. He joined the University of California, Los Angeles, as a full professor with joint appointments in computer science, psychiatry, and psychology. He moved to Johns Hopkins University in January 2016 when he was appointed a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor. He holds joint primary appointments in the Departments of Cognitive Science and Computer Science. His research interests include computational models of vision, mathematical models of cognition, medical image analysis, and artificial intelligence and neural networks. He directs the research group on Computational Cognition, Vision, and Learning (CCVL). He is affiliated with the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines, and the NSF Expedition in Computing, Visual Cortex on Silicon.

Alex Lu

Job Titles:
  • Fellow by Courtesy in the Language Creation and Learning Lab
Research Interests: Artificial intelligence; computer vision; medical, health and genomics

Annemarie Kocab

Job Titles:
  • Assistant Professor

Argye Hillis

Job Titles:
  • Professor

Avery Kaye

Job Titles:
  • Research Coordinator for the Language and Cognition ( Landau ) Lab

Barbara Landau

Job Titles:
  • Member of the National Academy of Sciences
Landau is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Cognitive Science Society, and several other organizations. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2009.

Barry Gordon

Job Titles:
  • Professor, School of Medicine, Neurology and Neurosurgery
Research Interests: Cognitive neurology, cognitive neuroscience, language, aphasia, memory, amnesia, and memory disorders, autism, computational models of cognition

Benjamin Van Durme

Job Titles:
  • Associate Professor, Whiting School of Engineering, Computer Science
Research Interests: Natural language processing, specifically semantics; streaming/randomized algorithms

Bernard Nwankwo

Job Titles:
  • Systems Administrator, KSAS IT

Brenda Rapp

Job Titles:
  • Research Professor

Brice Ménard

Job Titles:
  • Professor, Physics and Astronomy
Research Interests: Machine Learning, astrophysics & complex systems

Bruce Tesar

Job Titles:
  • Professor, Department of Linguistics, Rutgers

Cassie Kim

Job Titles:
  • Research Coordinator for the Language Creation & Learning ( Kocab ) Lab

Chaz Firestone

Job Titles:
  • Associate Professor, Psychological & Brain Sciences
Research Interests: Perception, attention, visual cognition, foundations of cognitive science

Clare Boothe Luce

Job Titles:
  • Assistant Professor

Colin Wilson

Job Titles:
  • Advisor
  • Professor, Director of Undergraduate Studies

Dana Boatman

Job Titles:
  • Professor, School of Medicine, Neurology and Neurosurgery
Research Interests: Speech perception, auditory processing disorders, auditory neurophysiology

Developmental Dysgraphia


Donald Li

Job Titles:
  • Visiting Assistant Professor

Emalie McMahon

Job Titles:
  • Fellow by Courtesy in the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
Research Interests: Cognitive neuroscience, visual perception

Emory Davis

Job Titles:
  • Fellow by Courtesy in the Language and Cognition Lab ( Landau Lab )
Research Interests: Role of language in cognitive development; understanding of abstract concepts; mental/ attitude verbs

Gaja Jarosz

Job Titles:
  • Professor, Department of Linguistics, UMass at Amherst

Géraldine Legendre

Job Titles:
  • Professor & Chair

Haemy Lee Masson

Job Titles:
  • Fellow

Jason Eisner

Job Titles:
  • Professor, Whiting School of Engineering, Computer Science
Research Interests: Computational linguistics, natural language processing, statistical machine learning

Jennifer Hu

Job Titles:
  • Assistant Research Professor / Assistant Professor Eff. July 2025

Jennifer Shea

Job Titles:
  • Research Program Coordinator for the Cognitive & Brain Sciences Lab

Jeremy Purcell

Job Titles:
  • Fellow by Courtesy in the Cognitive & Brain Sciences Lab ( Rapp Lab )
Research Interests: Written language representation and brain injury

John E. Desmond

Job Titles:
  • Professor, School of Medicine, Neurology and Neurosurgery
Research Interests: Neuroimaging, transcranial magnetic stimulation methods to investigate neural correlates of behavior

John T. Hale

Job Titles:
  • Professor, Department of Cognitive Science, JHU
  • Research Professor, Director of Graduate Admissions

Jonathan Flombaum

Job Titles:
  • Associate Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences
Research Interests: Visual perception, attention, cognition

Julia Yarmolinskaya

Job Titles:
  • Senior Lecturer

Justin Bledin

Job Titles:
  • Assistant Professor, Philosophy
Research Interests: Logic, philosophy of language (esp. formal semantics), epistemology

Justin Halberda

Job Titles:
  • Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences
Research Interests: Cognitive and developmental psychology

Kristin Gagnier

Job Titles:
  • Assistant Research Scientist in the Language & Cognition Lab ( Landau Lab )
Research Interests: interdisciplinary training in connecting cognitive science research to education practices

Kyle Rawlins

Job Titles:
  • Professor, Director of Graduate Studies

Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers

Job Titles:
  • Co - Editor

Lisa Hsin Davidson

Job Titles:
  • Professor, Department of Linguistics, NYU
The atoms of phonological representation: Gestures, coordination and perceptual features in consonant cluster phonotactics. 2003.

Luigi Burzio

Job Titles:
  • Professor Emeritus
Research Interests: Theoretical phonology, morphology, and syntax; romance linguistics Education: PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Lydia Todd

Job Titles:
  • Professor of Cognitive Science
Barbara Landau has been the Dick and Lydia Todd Professor of Cognitive Science since 2001, was the Vice Provost for Faculty from 2011-2014, and was the Director of the Science of Learning Institute from 2013-2018. Landau is interested in human knowledge of language and space, and the relationships between these two foundational systems of knowledge. Her central interests concern the nature of the cognitive "primitives" that are in place during early development, and support our remarkable capacity to recognize objects, move around space in a directed fashion, and talk about our spatial experience. Specific questions of interest include: How do children come to master the intricate relationships between meanings and their linguistic expression? How do we come to know about space, in order to recognize and remember objects, motions, and places in space? What is the relationship between language and space, and do these differ across different languages? How do humans use each system to enhance their use of the other system? When and how do the two systems come to "communicate" with each other? In thinking about these questions, Landau's research draws on a variety of approaches, including traditional experimental and linguistic methods adapted for young children. Although much of her work concerns the mechanisms of normal development, she is also interested in unusual cases of development, which can shed light on normal development and cognition. For example, studies of congenitally blind children can shed light on the relationship between perception and language; studies of people with Williams syndrome (a genetic deficit associated with deletion of 25 genes on chromosome 7) can shed light on the effects of genetic deletion on spatial organization and language learning, and studies of spatial representation in individuals who have sustained perinatal stroke can reveal the brain's organizational and developmental principles for space compared to language. More generally, these cases of unusual development afford the opportunity to think about the relationships among genes, the developing brain, and cognition.

Margaret E. L. Renwick

Job Titles:
  • Associate Research Professor

Marina Bedny

Job Titles:
  • Associate Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences
Research Interests: Brain development and plasticity, cognitive neuroscience, concepts

Matthew Goldrick

Job Titles:
  • Advisor

Matthias Lalisse

Job Titles:
  • Independent Consultant

Michael McCloskey

Job Titles:
  • Professor, Homewood IRB Chair
McCloskey, M., Reilhac, C., & Schubert, T. (2018). A deficit in post-graphemic writing processes: Evidence for a graphomotor buffer. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 35, 430-457. Gregory, E., & McCloskey, M. (2010). Mirror-image confusions: Implications for representation and processing of object orientation. Cognition, 116, 110-129. McCloskey, M., Macaruso, P., & Rapp, B. (2006). Grapheme-to-lexeme feedback in the spelling system: Evidence from a dysgraphic patient. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 23, 278-307.

Mick Bonner

Job Titles:
  • Colloquium Chair

Norberto Grzywacz

Job Titles:
  • Visiting Professor
Research Interests: Cognitive and computational neuroscience of aesthetic emotions

Pasha Koval

Job Titles:
  • Visiting Assistant Professor
Pasha Koval is a experimental syntactician. He will join our faculty in Fall 2024.

Rebecca Morley

Job Titles:
  • Department of Linguistics

Rennie Pasquinelli

Job Titles:
  • Fellow by Courtesy in the Language and Cognition Lab

Robert Wiley

Job Titles:
  • Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Cognitive & Brain Sciences Lab ( Rapp Lab )
Research Interests: Cognitive science and education, mental representation and learning, neural plasticity, second language acquisition

Sara Finley

Job Titles:
  • Department of Psychology

Sarah Ciotola

Job Titles:
  • Administrative Manager

Shari Liu

Job Titles:
  • Assistant Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences
, cognitive neuroscience, infant cognition, social cognition

Steven Gross

Job Titles:
  • Professor, Philosophy, Foundations of Mind Group

Sue Potterfield

Job Titles:
  • Analyst

Tamara Nicol Medina

Job Titles:
  • Advisor

Tianmin Shu

Job Titles:
  • Assistant Professor

Uyen Le

Job Titles:
  • Junior Lecturer / Professional TA

Wenshuo Qin

Job Titles:
  • Research Coordinator

Yuan Tao

Job Titles:
  • Assistant Research Scientist for the Cognitive and Brain Sciences Lab

Yuanfang Zhao

Job Titles:
  • Postdoctoral Fellow for the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab