Postdocs

Postdoctoral Associates: 2024-2026 Cohort

Hannah Hok Kim is a scholar of moral and social cognitive development with a focus on how children think about decision-making in groups, procedures, and rules. In her work, she has examined how children reason about majority rules decision-making in group contexts, as well as the inconsistency of rule use and motivation. She received her PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Chicago working with Alex Shaw. Prior to her time at MIT, Hannah worked at Harvard Libraries on digital scholarship initiatives, particularly focusing on how new technologies such as 3D objects and AI can be used to facilitate learning, research and general scholarship in university settings. Hannah is interested in studying open scholarship practice, norms, motivations, and belief across discipline and research method, with a particular focus on the epistemology of science. Outside of academics, Hannah likes to cook, read, play the bass, and draw.

James Michaelov is a scholar of cognitive science whose research focuses on language models and psycholinguistics. He earned his PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego in 2024, and previously studied Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, where he earned his Master’s degree in Cognitive Science. His main area of research is on the intersection of psycholinguistics and artificial intelligence, with a focus on how we can use language models and other computational systems to better understand human language comprehension in the brain, and how we can use insights from psycholinguistics to better understand and characterize the behavior of contemporary language models. At CREOS, he is interested in researching and developing guidelines for the responsible use of artificial intelligence systems in science. He also develops tools to improve access to natural language technologies such as language models for researchers in psycholinguistics.

2021-2023 Cohort

Corey Masao Johnson is an interdisciplinary scholar heavily invested in the potential of technology and design to transform knowledge production. Relying on digital research tools, his current book manuscript, “Artifacts of Encounter: Contested Geographies in Polynesia and the American Pacific,” examines attempts to map the cultural area of Polynesia and its peoples since the first moments of American exploration of the Pacific. He has also been involved with a number of Digital Humanities projects and initiatives. He has served as the technical director for the Out of the Desert Project at Yale University, a public history initiative that explores the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. He holds an A.B. in English Literature from Harvard University and an M.St. in English and American Studies from the University of Oxford. At Stanford University’s Program in Modern Thought and Literature, his PhD research was supported by a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship and a Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship from the Stanford Humanities Center. He was also a SHASS Pre-Doctoral Diversity Fellow in Global Studies and Languages at MIT and a visiting fellow at the American Philosophical Society. 

Suman Kalyan Maity (research affiliate 2023-2024) was previously a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI), Kellogg School of Management and Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) at Northwestern University. His research interests lie in the broad interdisciplinary areas of Computational Social Science, Machine Learning, and Computational Linguistics. The central theme of his research is in Science of Science with key focus in understanding how success or failure impact future performances. He has also studied the global landscape of grant funding and publications and the interplay between various factors leading to better understanding of team science and collaboration efforts. He is committed to Open Science and interested in studying the effect of various interventions in facilitating greater access to Science. 

Ashley J. Thomas (visiting scholar 2022-2024) investigates intuitive sociology, or what infants, toddlers, children, and adults think about social relationships. She has studied how infants and children think and feel about social hierarchy (i.e. situations where there is a ‘winner’ and a ‘loser’ or when someone is ‘in charge.’) She has also investigated how infants learn about their own social networks, including how infants interpret social interactions that involve their own caregivers, as well as how infants, toddlers, and children think about kin-like relationships. She is committed to making academic knowledge more accessible and transparent on local and global scales, as well as finding ways that we can take care of each other in academia. She is interested in structural changes that could improve academia as well as the world. Outside of her research, she has been a political organizer working on issues such as immigrant and worker rights. Following her tenure at MIT, Thomas joined the faculty of Harvard University.