Hannah Small

I am a post-doc working with Marlene Behrmann at UPitt in the Department of Opthamology. I earned my PhD in Computational Cognitive Science from Johns Hopkins University, where I worked with Leyla Isik.

I am interested in how the human mind makes sense of the social world from rapidly changing multimodal input, how the brain organizes the relevant systems, and why this neural architecture works. During my PhD, I investigated how the human brain processes simultaneous multimodal (vision+language) signals by combining deep learning and fMRI responses to naturalistic social stimuli, studying this in both autistic and non-autistic adults.

I earned my B.S. from University of Richmond where I studied biology and computer science and investigated how potassium ion channels modulated action potentials. Before graduate school, I worked in Ev Fedorenko’s lab at MIT, studying how the brain processes language.

Outside of research, I like to throw pots, read books, play Dungeons and Dragons, and learn new things (most recently Magic the Gathering).