Social Cognition: Jillian Lee Wiggins

Talk Title: “Uncovering the brain mechanisms of risk and resilience: Social and emotional functioning in children with mental health disorders”

Bio: Jillian Lee Wiggins, Ph.D. is a developmental psychologist who received her Ph.D. from University of Michigan in 2013. At the University of Michigan, Dr. Wiggins’ research focused on identifying the brain and genetic mechanisms of socio-emotional functioning (for example, social interaction with other people, reading people’s emotions, reacting to people’s facial expressions) in youth with autism spectrum disorder as well as typically developing youth. To do this, she used neuroscience tools (functional MRI, functional connectivity, genotyping) to link brain activation patterns in response to emotional faces to genetic variation in children and adolescents with and without autism. After completing her PhD, Dr. Wiggins joined the Emotion and Development Branch at the National Institute of Mental Health/National Institutes of Health (NIMH/NIH) as a post-doctoral fellow. At the NIH, Dr. Wiggins’ work examined brain mechanisms of processing socio-emotional stimuli (i.e., faces) in youth with severe irritability and bipolar disorder. Dr. Wiggins is now an Assistant Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University and the San Diego State University/University of California, San Diego Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology. Here in San Diego, Dr. Wiggins’ work on the brain mechanisms of irritability and other socio-emotional symptoms continues. As Director of the Translational Emotion Neuroscience and Development Laboratory (TEND Lab) at SDSU, Dr. Wiggins is investigating the neural mechanisms that predict how well children with mental health disorders will respond to specific treatments. This work will build the foundation to make treatment for mental health disorders in children more efficient and reduce families’ suffering.

Language and Culture: Rose Hendricks

Talk Title: “Metaphors & Thought: One Journey to a PhD.”

Bio: Rose Hendricks is a PhD Candidate in Cognitive Science at UCSD. She researches how metaphor shapes the way we think about the world. She’s excited about communicating science: on her blog (rosehendricks.com), on Twitter (@RoHendricks), and of course, in person!

Design and Interaction(HCI): Neema Mahdavi

Talk Title: Designing for Design

Neema Mahdavi graduated from UCSD in 2013. He has worked as a Design Consultant, a Product Designer, a UX Designer, Design Designer, and almost every variation of the “designer” title. Currently he is on the Design team at Workday where he focuses on Design Operations and creating the tooling designers need.

Ashwin and Neema founded the organization currently known as Design at UCSD in 2012 with the goal of creating a vibrant design community at UC San Diego and bridging the gap between Design in Academia and Industry. Since graduating, they have mentored many students in the organization and periodically speak at Design at UCSD events.

Design and Interaction(HCI): Ashwin Khurana

Talk Title: Designing for People, not Personas

Ashwin Khurana graduated from UCSD in 2014 with a B.S. in Cognitive Science and a specialization in HCI. He is one of the cofounders of Design at UCSD and is currently a Sr. Product Designer at Mint (Intuit). As an Intuit Innovation Catalyst, Ashwin coaches teams around the company in hypothesis driven experimentation, rapid prototyping, and deep customer empathy.

Ashwin and Neema founded the organization currently known as Design at UCSD in 2012 with the goal of creating a vibrant design community at UC San Diego and bridging the gap between Design in Academia and Industry. Since graduating, they have mentored many students in the organization and periodically speak at Design at UCSD events.

Machine Learning and Neural Computation: Gary Cottrell

Talk Title: Neural Networks as Models of the Mind

Bio: Garrison W. Cottrell is a Professor of Computer Science and
Engineering at UC San Diego. He is Director of the
Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Cognitive Science at
UCSD, and the Director of the Temporal Dynamics of Learning
Center, an NSF-sponsored Science of Learning Center
involving 40 PI’s at 18 institutions in four countries. He
is also a founding PI of the Perceptual Expertise Network.

Professor Cottrell’s main interest is Cognitive Science, in
particular, building working models of cognitive processes
and using them to explain psychological or neurological
processes. In recent years, he has focused upon unsupervised
feature learning (modeling precortical and cortical coding),
face & object processing, visual salience, and visual
attention. He has also worked in the areas of modeling
psycholinguistic processes, such as language acquisition,
reading, and word sense disambiguation. He received his
PhD. in 1985 from the University of Rochester under James
F. Allen (thesis title: A connectionist approach to word
sense disambiguation). He then did a postdoc with David
E. Rumelhart at the Institute of Cognitive Science, UCSD,
until 1987, when he joined the CSE Department.