Stephanie Badde is the inaugural holder of the Stibel Family Assistant Professorship of Brain and Cognitive Science in the Department of Psychology. The professorship recognizes an outstanding junior faculty member in the field of cognitive and brain sciences. Badde came to Tufts in 2020 from a postdoctoral research appointment in the Department of Psychology and the Center for Neural Science at New York University. She has a background in psychology and mathematics, and she completed her PhD at the University of Hamburg in Germany.

Badde’s research focuses on tactile and proprioceptive localization, optimal integration of multisensory information, cross-modal recalibration, and Bayesian models of perception. She has received several awards for her research achievements, including the biannual Best Dissertation Award from the German Psychological Society and the Lucien Levy Best Research Article Award from the American Journal of Neuroradiology. She is an active scholar and has published her research in journals such as Current Biology, eLife, and Nature Communications. Badde has also received multiple research and travel grants.

Robert Cook has studied animal cognition and behavior for more than 25 years. His National Institutes of Health–supported comparative research has focused extensively on stimulus control, discrimination learning, and memory in animals. His Comparative Cognition Lab currently studies, pigeons, starlings, and humans. He received his BS in psychology from the Ohio State University and his PhD in biopsychology from the University of California, Berkeley. He was also an NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston, before taking his position at Tufts. He currently serves as dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He is also the publisher of Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, and he has been on the editorial board of the top journals in animal cognition. He has also been active in broadening the impact and public visibility of the area’s scientific work by use of the Internet with the publication of the multimedia cyberbooks Avian Visual Cognition and Animal Spatial Cognition.

Cook’s research is in the general area of comparative animal cognition. In particular, he has been interested in the mechanisms of visual and auditory perception and discrimination learning in pigeons, starlings, and humans. Birds generally behave as if they perceive, learn, and act upon an object-filled visual world. The ultimate goal of his research is to understand how these small autonomous systems form accurate perceptions of the world and to then use this information to learn about and predict relations among real-world objects and events. His projects have looked at action recognition, same-different concept learning, the integration of temporal information, equivalence class formation, object perception, picture perception, motion perception, texture perception, the serial organization of behavior, and the neural mechanisms underlying these behaviors.

Gina R. Kuperberg, MD, PhD, is the Dennett Stibel Professor of Cognitive Science at Tufts University. She is also a board-certified psychiatrist and principal investigator in the Psychiatry Neuroscience Program at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her laboratory is using multimodal neuroimaging techniques (fMRI, MEG, and EEG-evoked responses, oscillatory activity, and representational similarity analysis), neuropsychological testing, and computational modeling to understand when, where, and how the human brain builds meaning from language, and how these mechanisms break down in neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. This research program is funded by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the Sidney R. Baer Jr. Foundation.