Speakers

Derek M. Isaacowitz is Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Director of the Lifespan Lab at Washington University in St Louis. He joined the WashU faculty after serving on the Psychology faculty at Brandeis and at Northeastern. He was an undergraduate student at Stanford University, and received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. His research on emotion regulation and social perception in the context of adult development and aging has been funded by the National Institute on Aging, National Institute of Mental Health, and Velux Stiftung. This research has appeared in journals such as Psychological Science, Social and Psychological and Personality Science, Emotion, and Affective Science. He was editor-in-chief of the Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences until the end of 2023 and in 2024 became a senior editor at Psychological Science. He previously served as chair of the Social Psychology, Personality and Interpersonal Processes study section at NIH. He is the 2025 recipient of the Mid-Career Research Trajectory Award from the Society for Affective Science, and also received the Springer Early Career Achievement Award from Division 20 (Adult Development and Aging) of the American Psychological Association, the Margret M. and Paul B. Baltes Foundation Award in Behavioral and Social Gerontology, for Outstanding Early Career Contributions, from the Gerontological Society of America, as well as teaching and mentoring awards.

Michiko Sakaki received her PhD in Educational Psychology at the University of Tokyo in 2007. She received her postdoc training on neuroscience at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan, as well as additional postdoc training on cognitive neuroscience and aging at the University of Southern California in USA. She then worked at the University of Reading, UK between 2013 and 2020 as a senior research fellow. Since 2021, she is a tenure track professor at the University of Tübingen, Germany.

Erin Grant is a Senior Research Fellow at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit and the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at University College London. Erin studies prior knowledge and learning mechanisms in minds, brains, and machines using a combination of behavioral experiments, computational simulations, and analytical techniques, with the goal of grounding higher-level cognitive phenomena in a neural implementation. Erin earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2022 with support from Canada’s Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. During her Ph.D., Erin spent time at OpenAI, Google Brain, and DeepMind. Erin currently serves on the Women in Machine Learning Board of Directors.

Dr. Luke Stoeckel is a licensed clinical neuropsychologist and cognitive neuroscientist. He directs the Neuropsychological Change, Interventions, and Decision Science Programs in the Division of Behavioral and Social Research at the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health.  Dr. Stoeckel completed his undergraduate studies at Harvard College, his PhD in Medical/Clinical Psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and his internship and postdoctoral training in clinical neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), McLean Hospital, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Harvard Medical School (HMS). Prior to joining NIH, he was the Director of Clinical Neuroscience at the MGH Center for Addiction Medicine, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School, Affiliated faculty at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Engineering at MGH, and a Visiting Scientist at McLean Hospital and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT.