Current Members
Cleotilde (Coty) Gonzalez, Ph.D.
Founding Director, DDMLab, Co-Director NSF Institute for AI in Societal Decision Making (AISDM)
Coty is a Full Professor, tenured in the department of Social and Decision Sciences at CMU. She earned a Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from Texas Tech University in 1996.
Coty's research lies at the intersection of Human Behavioral Decision Making and Technology. Her research program is motivated by real-world decision making and by the challenges involved in studying dynamic decision making in the laboratory. Her research is embedded within a theoretical framework that emphasizes the role and development of decisions from experience, the similarity of contexts, and the cognitive abilities of decision makers.
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Xiaohong Cai, Ph.D.
Ph.D. Researcher
Xiaohong Cai earned her Ph.D. in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Indiana University Bloomington in 2025. Her research examines how context influences human judgment and decision making, with a particular focus on the attraction, similarity, and compromise effects. She is now extending this work to explore how broader contextual structures shape decision processes in humanâAI interaction.
ContactE-mail: xiaohonc@andrew.cmu.edu
Grace Roessling, Ph.D.
Ph.D. Researcher
Grace Roessling recently earned her PhD in Cognitive Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. At the DDM Lab, her research focuses broadly on human-machine collaboration, with an emphasis on Human-AI complementarity in two domains: behavioral cybersecurity and disaster management. Both projects involve cognitive modeling and the integration of generative AI to enhance decision-making and coordination between humans and AI systems.
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Marko Morrison
Ph.D. Student
Marko Morrison is an incoming Ph.D. student in Societal Computing through the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include cyber deception, automated cyber-attack/defense systems, computational cognition, multi-agent systems, and reinforcement learning. He received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Washington at Bothell in 2024, during which he led the Gray Hats Cybersecurity Club. Beyond research, Marko also enjoys playing guitar and boxing.
ContactE-mail: mpmorris@andrew.cmu.edu
Jeffrey Flagg, M.S.
Lab Manager - Research Associate II
Jeffrey obtained his Bachelorâs and Masterâs Degree in Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests include information sharing, online privacy concerns, newcomers to groups, and social exclusion. He has previously managed the Privacy Economics Experiments (PEEX) Lab based at the Heinz College, and is now supporting the management of the DDMLab in its daily operation and development.
ContactE-mail: jflagg@andrew.cmu.edu
Don Morrison
Senior Research Programmer
Don received his S.B. in Physics from M.I.T., and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Utah. He works on software supporting researchers in the DDMLab and the Psychology Department's FMS Group. He previously worked in the HCII, and before that a variety of software companies. Outside of work, Don is obsessed with change ringing, an obscure art form that arose in Renaissance England and combines music, sport, and group theory.
ContactE-mail: dfm2@cmu.edu
Kibo Schaffer
Research Programmer
I am an independent cybersecurity researcher. My personal interests also fall in the intersection of feedback structures, organizational design patterns, and cognitive limits that lead to security vulnerabilities, from which I derive heuristics for what parts of a system are most likely to harbor bugs. At the Dynamic Decision Making Lab, I am responsible for managing the internal server, maintaining PyIBL, and providing software development assistance.
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Yuchen Dai
Research Assistant
Yuchen Dai graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with both a Bachelorâs and a Masterâs degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Her work focuses on the American Red Cross (ARC) project, where she develops AI-powered, game-based disaster response simulations to support training and decision-making in dynamic environments. She builds end-to-end systems in Unity and integrates LLM-driven agents with configurable autonomy. Outside of work, Yuchen enjoys making games, painting, and cooking.
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Vlad Miloserdov
Student Research Assistant
Vlad Miloserdov is an undergraduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, pursuing degrees in Computer Science and Logic. As a research assistant at DDM Lab, Vlad contributes to the development of advanced simulations designed to model and counter network threats. His work aims to enhance strategic decision-making in complex cyber environments, advancing the field of digital defense. Vladâs research interests lie in building multi-agent environments that optimize coordination and response in dynamic network settings.
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Aarya Bhave
Undergraduate Student Research Assistant
Aarya is an undergraduate student at Pune Institute of Computer Technology, pursuing a degree in Computer Engineering. Aarya has first authored and published work on contrastive learning in affiliation with MIT, where he worked as a research intern at the CCI Lab. Aarya also worked as a SWE Intern at Google, where he built AI Security and systems meant to prevent prompt injection and jailbreak. Aarya's research interests lie in leveraging knowledge of human cognition to shield state of the art LLMs from advanced jailbreak attempts.
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Jinfeng Lou, Ph.D.
Associated Researcher
Jinfeng Lou is a Carnegie Bosch Postdoctoral Fellow. He earned his Ph.D. from The University of Hong Kong, where his research centered on advancing resilience and sustainability within the building and civil infrastructure sector by developing various AI and secured information systems. Within the Dynamic Decision Making Lab, he will explore human-AI collaboration in improving the response and recovery process of urban subway flooding.
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