People
Meet the Team!
Caroline Charpentier
Principle Investigator
Caroline joined the faculty at the University of Maryland in August 2023 as Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology. She is also affiliated with the Brain and Behavior Institute and Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program. She completed her postdoctoral training with John O’Doherty at the California Institute of Technology, where she also collaborated with Ralph Adolphs and Dean Mobbs. Her research, focusing on the neuro-computational mechanisms of social learning, has been funded by the Wellcome Trust and the National Institute of Mental Health. Prior to that, Caroline obtained her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, where she studied the interaction between emotion and decision-making. Caroline grew up in France, and outside of work, she enjoys traveling and being in nature.
Xiaodi (Sara) Hu
Lab Manager and Research Assistant
Sara recently graduated from the Human-Computer Interaction Master's program at iSchool, UMD. Before that, she earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science with a triple major in Psychology and Physics. She is interested in multiple subjects and is working on narrowing them down to find a focus for a PhD degree in the future. Her hobbies include Call of Cthulhu RPG, crocheting, reading, video games, and thrifting.
Sean Maulhardt
Graduate student
Sean is a Ph.D student who earned his degrees in Psychology, studying for his Bachelor’s at CSU Channel Islands where he began investigation into automaticity versus controlled processing. During his Master’s at NYU, where he collaborated with Catherine Hartley and accomplished a thesis exploring human interactions of temporal credit assignment and declarative memory. During his initial two years at UMD, Sean was privileged to work alongside Alec Solway, engaging in diverse projects related to the successor representation, hierarchical Bayesian modeling, confidence, perceptual decision making, and further exploring temporal credit assignment. He hopes to further his academic journey in statistics and psychology where he aspires to eventually become a lecturer.
Yukta Thyagaraj
Master’s student
Yukta is a Master’s student at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, where she also recently completed her Bachelor’s degree in Biology. She is doing her Master’s project at the Social Learning and Decisions Lab. Her project aims to characterize feedback-seeking behaviour in social anxiety. She is interested in human social cognition, and plans to pursue a PhD in a related area. In her free time, she likes to sketch, listen to podcasts and read popular science psychology books.
Collaborators!
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Qianying Wu (Caltech, Graduate Student)
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Haroon Popal (UMD, Postdoc)
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Lisa Kluen (Staff Scientist, Harvard Medical School)
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Tessa Rusch (Caltech, Postdoc)
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Jeff Cockburn (Caltech, Research Scientist)
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Matt Roesch (UMD, PI)
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John O’Doherty (Caltech, PI)
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Ralph Adolphs (Caltech, PI)
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Reza Tadayonnejad (UCLA, PI)