Nan Wang

I am a first-year PhD student from Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, advised by Dr. Chigusa Kurumada and Dr. T. Florian Jaeger. Before that, I obtained my MA from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2024; my BA from Nanjing Normal University in 2023. I am driven to do useful and robust science.

To do useful science, I work on speech perception, learning and adaptation with a lens of what they reveal about the human mind and I use a combination of behavioral and neural measures. Learning or adaptation are shaped by variability of stimulus, engagement of learners and intensity of tasks [1]. They are also shaped jointly by acoustic information and contextual knowledge. One project of mine pursues the combination of the two in speech adaptation.

To do robust science, I use probabilistic models to force clarity around theories and concepts. Especially, I work with ideal Bayesian models which can provide an ideal benchmark against which human performance can be compared against. But much more can be done than running the benchmark, including asking which parts of the generative structure are themselves learned rather than given, integrating response-time data alongside choice data, etc. My exploratory project deals with this.

I consider myself very privileged to be able to do research in academia and in US especially. I try not to forget that the door opened for me partly by effort and partly by luck. I am eager to help those who similarly wants to get a foothold in computational modeling, or pursue a PhD in general. Please feel free to reach out to me and ask me questions (nwang40@ur.rochester.edu), I'm happy to help when I can.