Hi there 🔆

Nelu Radpour is a Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience PhD Student and a member of the Learning, Memory and Language Lab in the Department of Psychology at Florida State University, working with Dr. Michael Kaschak. Her research is centered on how people acquire new knowledge, with two main threads. The first is the mechanisms underlying conceptual integration (i.e., how people integrate new information into existing semantic and cognitive structures) and what drives flexibility and rigidity in that process. The second explores how people use AI tools and technologies as partners/aids in learning, and how these systems shape not only what we learn, but how we come to know and synthesize information in meaningful ways.

Previously, she studied cognitive and information science at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she worked with Dr. Michael Paul. Her past work looked at how we can leverage machine learning to better model language and social dynamics like gesture recognition for sign language and the spread of health information. After that, she spent a couple of years as a preschool teacher, both at a Montessori and a forest kindergarten, which deepened her interest in how people acquire knowledge and led her to shift her focus toward the mechanisms that support learning. And long before that, she earned her BA from the University of Texas at Austin in linguistics, where she first learned how vector space models can serve as proxies for our thoughts, forever sparking her passion for language, cognition, and computation. 😄