Graduate Students

Project: LAMBDA
I am a graduate student in Educational Psychology, in the Human Development area. I obtained my B.S. in Psychology in 2014 and my M.S. in Neuroscience in 2017, both at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. My first experience at the EdNeuroLab was an undergraduate visiting student back in 2013. I enjoyed the lab culture so much and was so intrigued by their research questions that I came back as a graduate student in 2017! I am very interested in understanding the neural and behavioral underpinnings of numerical cognition, with the final goal of helping those who are struggling to learn mathematics. Currently, in my research, I am interested in understanding the development of children’s fraction operations skills.

Project: Pretend Play through the Lifespan

Katherine holds a BFA in Acting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an MA in Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies with an emphasis in Theatre for Youth and an MS in Educational Psychology, both from the UW-Madison. Katherine’s current dissertation research focuses on the phenomenon of pretend play throughout the lifespan. Her research generally is interested in what and how people learn through arts practices and play. She also works with Dr. Erica Halverson’s Community Arts Collaboratory, and gets very excited about mixed-methods research designs. In addition to scholarship, Katherine maintains active practices as an actor and teaching artist.

Personal website: http://KatherineENorman.com/research

Project: LAMBDA, Computational Modeling & Neural Networks
Sean is a Ph.D. student in the Psychology Department working with Professor Joseph Austerweil and Professor Edward Hubbard. He currently investigates children’s math cognition development via computational modeling with fMRI data. He also investigates the “number sense” in artificial neural networks and compares it to human’s math cognition. In addition, with the collaboration with Professor Jerry Zhu, he also works on modeling teacher-student interactions and optimizing teaching with the Markov decision process framework. He received his BS in psychology and neuroscience from National Taiwan University.

Personal Website: https://yunshiuan.github.io/
Email: yunshiuan.chuang@wisc.edu

Project: Multisensory Integration (MSI)
My name is Irene, and I’m a visiting student from National Taiwan University. It is my pleasure to work with the Educational Neuroscience Lab this year. As part of the Multisensory Integration team, I find learning new things and asking questions about the data most interesting. I also have some previous experience with user experience research, especially how technology should develop according to human needs. My hobbies are music, arts, and traveling! My research interests lie in multisensory integration and cognition, and I look forward to exploring these areas further in grad school.