People
Principal Investigator
Current Full-Time Members
Will Decker
Ph.D. StudentWill is a 1st year Psychology PhD student in the LIT Lab. He is interested in how human and machine brains learn and represent information, like language! Will enjoys coding, reading and watching TV. His favorite TV shows are The Simpsons and Avatar: The Last Airbender.[website] [email]
Taha Binhuraib
Ph.D. StudentTaha Binhuraib, a Georgia Tech PhD student in Psychology, explores the intersection of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. With a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Bahcesehir University, Turkey, his research delves into topographic language modeling, cognitively plausible modeling, and LLMs. Taha's work aims to bridge the gap between human cognition and advanced AI systems.[email]
Jin Li
PostdocJin received her PhD from Ohio State University (supervised by Dr. Zeynep Sagyin). Working as a postdoc with Anya, Jin is interested in using neuroimaging to tease apart the relationship between different cognitive processes and language and combining computational approaches to further explore the mechanisms of their interaction. For example, how does the human brain process meanings (i.e., semantic information) from various types and formats? Whether and how different languages might shape our mental spaces differently.[email]
Ruimin Gao
Research TechnicianRuimin is the research technician in the LIT Lab. She is interested in understanding how the human brain processes and represents contextual information during language processing, and how LLM and AI techniques can help answer questions about human cognitive processes. In her spare time, Ruimin loves coding and traveling.[website] [email]Current Part-Time Members
Eyas Ayesh
Master's StudentEyas Ayesh is a Masters student double majoring in Mechanical Engineering and Statistics. He is interested in studying and understanding mechanisms of intelligence in different systems. At the LIT lab he is investigating the semantic differention by the language network in the brain. [website] [email]
Om Bhatt
Master's StudentHi! I'm interested in exploring how ML models exhibit human-like effects both in language and vision, especially from a neuroscientific perspective. I come from an undergraduate background in CS and Philosophy, which eventually led me to the psychology-based ethos at LIT. I love to spend my free time at concerts, watching horror movies, or practicing creative writing![email]
Zhihao Qin
Master's StudentZihan is a master's student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interest lies in leveraging cognitive science to improve large language models.[email]
Unnathi Kumar
Undergraduate StudentUnnathi is an undergraduate student majoring in computer science with a minor in economics. She is exploring the ways in which LLMs mimic human cognition and the factors that affect the performance of LLMs at the LIT Lab. [email]
George Flint
Undergraduate StudentGeorge Flint is a student and researcher of cognitive science in the Class of 2026 at UC Berkeley.His areas of interest lay primarily in mechanistic theoretical cognitive science, linguistic relativity, and information theory, mostly investigated computationally. [website] [email]
Sydney Idleburg
Undergraduate StudentSydney is a second-year student at Georgia Tech, majoring in neuroscience. She is interested in investigating the relationship between inner speech and brain activity utilizing techniques such as fMRI.[email]
Yihan Zhou
Affiliated ResearcherYihan is a machine learning engineer with a deep background in HCI. She combines her expertise in both professional and academic settings to explore research in the intersection of machine learning and cognitive neuroscience.[email]Mentors & Collaborators
Evelina Fedorenko
Associate Professor,MIT
Jacob Andreas
Associate Professor,MIT
Nancy Kanwisher
Professor,MIT
Ratan Murty
Assistant Professor,Georgia Tech
Kyle Mahowald
Assistant Professor,UT Austin
Carina Kauf
PhD Candidate,MIT
Ben Lipkin
PhD Student,MIT
Aalok Sathe
Research Assistant,MIT
Eric Martinez
PhD Candidate,MIT
Idan Blank (MIT/UCLA)
Alex Paunov (MIT/NeuroSpin)
Gabe Grand (MIT)
Roger Levy (MIT)
Josh Tenenbaum (MIT)
Thomas Clark (MIT)
Pramod RT (MIT)
Vivian Paulun (MIT)
Setayesh Radkani (MIT)
Jenn Hu (MIT/Harvard)
Ekin Akyürek (MIT)
Ced Zhang (MIT)
Maria Ryskina (MIT)
Mentees
Selena She (MIT)
David Oluigbo (MIT)
Josleen St Luce (MIT)
Alyx Tanner (MIT/UPenn)
Yotaro Sueoka (MIT/Johns Hopkins)
Chandler Cheung (UPenn)
Zawad Chowdhury (MIT/UW)
George Flint (UC Berkeley)
Past Collaborators
Hope Kean (MIT)
Zach Mineroff (MIT)
Alvincé Pongos (MIT/Berkeley-UCSF)
Shashank Srikant (MIT)
Una-May O’Reilly (MIT)
Jon Gauthier (MIT/UCSF)
Matthias Hofer (MIT)
Martin Schrimpf (MIT/EPFL)
Noga Zaslavsky (MIT/UC Davis)
Marina Bers (Tufts)
Riva Dhamala (Tufts)
John Hewitt (Stanford)
Rosemary Varley (UCL)
Vitor Zimmerer (UCL)
Yael Benn (Manchester Metropolitan)
Oliver Clark (Manchester Metropolitan)
Alessandro Lenci (Università di Pisa)
Giulia Rambelli (Università di Bologna)
Emmanuele Chersoni (Hong Kong Polytechnic)
Leyla Isik (Johns Hopkins)
Stefano Anzellotti (Boston College)
Lucina Uddin (UCLA)
Stella de Bode (UCLA)