Post Doctoral Fellow

Email: ude.sionilli@2kabab
Lab Phone: 217-300-2530

Babak grew up and went to college in Iran, where he received a B.A. in Clinical Psychology from University of Tehran. He then completed an M.S. in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science at Brown University in 2021. Having started a 3-year Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship in January 2022, he studies how social information is internalized and negotiated with other community members using theory-driven but AI-aided text analysis, neuroimaging, and behavioral experiments. He is particularly interested in the causal and narrative frames for organizing and communication information. Current projects include neuroimaging investigations of the interplay between causal inference and executive functions, longitudinal analysis of Reddit discourse about marijuana legalization using modern neural networks, and evaluation of social biases in text generation.