The Neukom Fellows Program launched in 2012. Fellows have two-year appointments with the option for a third year and for their interdisciplinary work which has a computational theme, are co-sponsored and mentored by faculty in at least two departments or programs. Fellows teach one course in each year of their residency. The Class of 2025 Neukom Fellows with their departmental affiliations are given below, along with descriptions from the Fellows of their research plans.
Psychological and Brain Sciences and Computer Science; Mentors - Caroline Robertson, SouYoung Jin.
Charlotte is a cognitive neuroscientist who focuses on the relationship between organization and function in the brain, with a specific interest in neurodiversity such as autism. Her dissertation described visual activation patterns in memory-related areas. Her work also shone a light on the organizational differences between the human visual system and an artificially intelligent image classification model. As a Neukom Fellow, she will continue to employ artificial neural networks to characterize human neural activity patterns. The predictive power from these models can be leveraged to understand how memories are encoded in the brain across typical individuals and individuals with autism.
Anthropology and Earth Sciences; Mentors - Jesse Casana and Marisa Palucis
Paige is a landscape archaeologist specialized in remote sensing and spatial modeling methods to explore movement, mobility, and settlement patterns in past societies. Her research examines how people adapted to the challenges and opportunities of arid and mountainous landscapes and how these adaptations intersected with social and political organization. As a Neukom Fellow, Paige focuses on two key areas: pedestrian modeling and archaeological prospection. Leveraging high-performance computing, she models human and animal movement to study how people used the landscape at different times. Additionally, she employs geophysical and drone-based remote sensing technologies to uncover archaeological sites in arid regions, advancing our understanding of how ancient societies thrived in extreme environments.
Georgraphy and Computer Science; Mentors - Luis F. Alvarez León, Jonathan Chipman, and Herbert Chang
Tim is a geographer who studies the science behind why and when people trust maps. Tim's research focuses on maps that function as data visualizations by overlaying data on top of geography. During his PhD, he developed a new method for measuring people's trust in maps and investigated design factors that influence people's trust in maps. As a Neukom fellow, Tim will work with quantitative social scientists to examine how pervasive maps are in spreading (mis)information, and whether maps are more trusted compared to text, images, or video. His research will also pinpoint the major design, technological, and social cues that shape people's trust judgements of maps.
Earth Sciences and Biology; Mentors - Sarah Slotznick and Olga Zhaxybayeva
Erik studies molecular phylogenetics: using gene sequences in modern organisms to understand how the genes and the organisms hosting them are related to each other, and to look backwards into their evolution. Complementing the fossil record, this genomic record especially improves our understanding of evolution in the microbial realm, which dominated the biosphere for most of Earth history. As a Neukom Fellow, Erik plans to focus on evolutionary processes governing not the survival of organisms, but their adaptations: what does it depend on whether an anatomical structure or a metabolic process survives over geological time? Microbial metabolisms are particularly interesting in this regard, as they regulate the Earth's surface environments for everyone.