Tanushree Agrawal recently completed her PhD in Experimental Psychology at the University of California San Diego, and is currently an Asst. Project Scientist and Lecturer at UC San Diego. She has a Masters in music psychology from the University of Oxford, and Bachelors degrees in Cognitive Science and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. Tanushree recently served as Trainee Representative and co-founder of the Mentorship Committee on the executive board of the Society for Music Perception & Cognition. Her work has been published in journals such as Developmental Science and Open Mind, and has been funded by the Grammy Foundation and the CARTA Institute.

Tanushree’s research uncovers how factors like creativity and aesthetic engagement can strongly impact everyday social reasoning. Her work shows that aesthetically-motivated individuals are judged as higher moral beings who are more wrong to harm and also less likely to harm others; such evaluations are driven by enhanced perceptions of mental traits in those who are creatively-motivated (e.g., their intelligence, emotional sensitivity, and capacity to experience physical sensations like pain or hunger). Her work highlights that the crucial underlying factor is not the creative activity in and of itself (e.g., music or art), but rather, the social information conveyed about an individual who has the capacity to find value in something as abstract and nuanced as creativity or aesthetic beauty.

Rachit is a postdoctoral research fellow at MIT Sloan School of Management. Previously, he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University and a Masters in Education from University of California, Berkeley. His work has been published in journals such as PNAS, Nature Sustainability, Psychological Review among others and been covered in popular outlets such as BBC and MIT Tech Review. 

Rachit’s research focuses on understanding intrinsic motivation i.e., the motives that drive us to explore and learn even in the absence external rewards. Specifically, he employs computational modeling and behavioral experiments to better understand when and why different motives help us and when do they become maladaptive and lead us astray. Using this approach, he has provided a normative perspective of curiosity and Aha! moments as well as developed interventions to pique people’s curiosity for everyday scientific topics. He hopes that this work can inform creativity researchers interested in studying how creative solutions arise as well as education researchers interested in motivating people to persist through challenges. 

Lucas Bellaiche is a PhD Candidate at Duke University, housed between the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. He obtained his MA from Duke in Cognitive Neuroscience, and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Bachelor of Science in Statistics from the University of Arkansas.

Lucas is primarily interested in the intersection of creativity and emotion, as measured through interdisciplinary avenues and methodologies. In one line of research, he examines the cognitive consequences of engaging with art, including the emotional benefits (e.g., art therapy; manuscript in prep), aesthetic judgments, and imaginative processes that arise from viewing and producing art. Secondly, he is also interested in the broad role of creativity in emotion regulation: how does flexible thinking benefit us when facing adverse events (manuscript under review)? Studying creativity and emotion, he hopes to elucidate how these two of the most valued expressions of humanity rely on one another, and ultimately, how we rely on them.