About Me

Hi, I’m Cindy! I’m a rising 2nd-year PhD student in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, advised by Prof. Talia Konkle and Prof. George Alvarez, working across the Cognitive and Neural Organization Lab and the Vision Sciences Lab. My research is generously supported by the Graduate Fellowship at the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural & Artificial Intelligence.

Broadly, I’m interested in understanding how humans and machines process and integrate vision and language during learning. I’m particularly fascinated by how neural networks combine linguistic and visual inputs, and how these processes align with/differ from human multi-modal learning. Central questions that drive my work include: How does language facilitate learning from visual experiences (or does it)? Conversely, how do visual experiences enrich linguistic understanding? By examining learning trajectories in both artificial systems and human cognitive development, I hope to understand how our visual and linguistic systems interact to form rich representations of the world that guide our behavior and interactions.

Prior to joining Harvard, I earned my B.A. in Psychology and Mathematics from Grinnell College and my M.S. in Data Science from New York University. I was extremely fortunate to be mentored by several awesome researchers, including Brenden Lake, Grace Lindsay, Tomer Ullman, and Sam Gershman.

Science + …

When I’m not thinking about vision-language and computational cognitive science (during mind cluster maintenance), you’ll find me hunting for great restaurants and boba spots, taking nice snapshots of my friends, and enjoying safe(-ish) thrills like rock climbing and scuba diving. Always happy to trade restaurant lists! ;)