2018 Symposium Judges, Speakers, and Coordinators

Panel of Judges

Charles Baxley is a first year PhD student in the psychology department. Charles is generally interested in how people, especially those in underrepresented groups, interact with situations involving morality, and how this interaction develops over the lifespan.

Andrew Hedding is a third year PhD student in the department of linguistics. Broadly speaking, his research deals with the interaction between sentence structure and intonation, with a focus on investigating understudied languages. Currently, he works with speakers of San Martín Peras Mixtec, an indigenous language of Mexico, in the Watsonville area.

Mckenna Hicks is a Masters student in microbiology. Her research involves synthetic biology and genetic engineering in cyanobacteria to produce specific molecules.

Ana McTaggart is a fourth year PhD student in computer science. Ana studies computer privacy and how to protect access patterns from information leakage.

Kirstin Wagner is a third year PhD candidate in the literature department where she teaches creative writing classes and writes about matrilineal narrative inheritance in families organizing around domestic violence. She also works as a Graduate Student Researcher at the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL).

Keynote Speakers

We would like to thank Professor Raja GuhaThakurta and Professor Rebecca London for participating as the Keynote Speakers at the Symposium. They provided inspiration, humor, great examples of student collaboration, and motivation to create significant research.

Symposium Coordinators

Talia Waltzer: has a background in psychology and cognitive science, and is currently a fourth-year phD student researching moral development and reasoning at UC Santa Cruz. Talia is passionate about creating educational opportunities for people through both basic research and applied work.

Carmelle Bareket-Shavit: is a current undergraduate psychology and cognitive science student and research assistant in the Early Social Interaction Lab at UC Santa Cruz. She plans to pursue a career in cognitive fields of research. She is specifically interested in research related to perception and belief perseverance.

Max Wechsler-Azen: is a third-year undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz studying cognitive science, interested in learning more about the academic misconduct process and how to improve the current system for both students and faculty.

Arvid Samuelson: is a fourth-year transfer student pursuing an Intensive Psychology degree here at UC Santa Cruz. He is currently working on a project looking at when/why students report their peers for academic misconduct.

Maddy Dolinh: is an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz pursuing a bachelor's in biology and in psychology, interested in looking at the biological basis of behavior, especially in how children formulate beliefs about themselves and their surrounding communities.

Kat Hsiao: is an undergraduate student at UCSC pursuing a major in cognitive science and computer science. She plans to pursue a career in human-robotic interaction.