CCSC 2024

Yoona Kang (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University – Camden. Kang’s research focuses on how social experiences influence the health of individuals and groups. She examines evidence-based prevention strategies, such as compassion, purpose in life, and mindfulness interventions, and integrate neurocognitive and social network levels of analysis to understand and prevent health risks among diverse populations. She takes multimethod approaches that integrate experimental and behavioral paradigms, computational neuroimaging techniques, ecological momentary assessment, social-network analysis, and natural language processing. She has applied these methods to intertwined dimensions of wellness, including physical activity, alcohol drinking, social connection, and loneliness. Kang received her bachelor’s degree in Psychology from University of California, Los Angeles, and Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Yale University. Post PhD, Kang conducted research as a postdoctoral researcher and research director at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.

Anne L. Beatty-Martínez received her Ph.D. in Spanish and Language Science at Penn State University in 2019. She was subsequently an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein postdoctoral fellow at McGill University. Her research has two intertwined strands: one that examines how cognition supports language use and another that asks how language use impacts cognition itself. At UCSD, she is the director of the Bilingualism in Context Lab which combines ethnographic and experimental approaches, including corpus-based, eye-tracking, and electrophysiological methods, to better understand how the mind and brain adapt to the demands of more than one language.

Dongyu Liu is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. He obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2019. Before joining UC Davis, he was a postdoctoral associate at MIT. His research lies at the intersection of Machine Learning (ML), Visualization (VIS), and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). He designs and develops visualization-empowered human-AI teaming systems to augment human intelligence for data-driven decision-making. His research has been published in top computer science venues such as TVCG, VIS, CHI, CSCW, SIGMOD, earning recognition including a best paper award at VIS’18 and an honorable mention at VIS’21. His techniques have been adopted for external or internal use by leading tech companies and nonprofits and also gained coverage in MIT News, Dataconomy, ScienceDaily, InfoQ, and Health IT Analytics.

Mahesh Srinivasan is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He directs the UC Berkeley Language and Cognitive Development Laboratory, which explores how linguistic, cognitive, and social abilities arise and interact during human development and across different cultures. He is also co-scientific director of the Psychology and Economics of Poverty Initiative at the Center for Effective Global Action. His work has been published in journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cognition, Child Development, and Developmental Science, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the James S. McDonnell Foundation.

Tim Lomas, PhD, is a Psychology Research Scientist in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and part of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University. Tim’s main research focus is exploring cross-cultural perspectives on wellbeing, especially concepts and practices deemed ‘non-Western.’ Current projects include: assisting with the Global Flourishing Study, a longitudinal study of 240,000 people in 22 countries; helping lead the Global Wellbeing Initiative, a collaboration with Gallup to develop and analyse new items for their World Poll that reflect non-Western views of wellbeing; creating a lexicography and conceptual map of ‘untranslatable’ words relating to wellbeing; and leading a project funded by the Templeton Foundation to look into Muslim perspectives on wellbeing. Before entering academia, Tim spent seven years as a professional musician, while also working part-time as a psychiatric nursing assistant. Tim completed his PhD at the University of Westminster in 2012, where his thesis focused on the impact of meditation on men's mental health (combining cognitive neuroscience, narrative, and ethnographic analysis). From 2013 to 2020 Tim was a lecturer in positive psychology at the University of East London. Since 2013, Tim has published over 100 papers and 12 books relating to wellbeing, involving topics/approaches including linguistics, semiotics, art, emotional dialectics, balance/harmony, systems theory, social theory, politics, gender, and Buddhism. His latest book, entitled Happiness, was published in 2023 by MIT Press as part of their Essential Knowledge series.