Carnegie Mellon University ———
Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences  ›  Social and Decision Sciences  ›  People  ›  Research Staff

Anna Maria Berta

Research Project Manager

Address
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Alison Butler

Research Assistant

Address
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Alison received her Bachelor's degree in Neuroscience and Economics from the Ohio State University in 2016. Shortly afterwards , she began studying as an MD/ PhD student in the Medical Scientist Training Program at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests involve health psychology, health risk perception, risk tradeoffs in clinical decision-making, and applications of behavioral economics in medicine. She is working with the Dynamic Decision-Making lab on a project examining how people think about end-of-life scenarios and form preferences surrounding end-of-life care.

Jeffrey Flagg

Research Associate II

Address
4609 Winthrop St., First Floor
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Jeffrey obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s 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.

Mandy Lanyon

Research Associate II

Address
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Don Morrison

Senior Research Programmer

  • WEH 4608
Address
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

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.

Robin Na

Pre-doctoral Research Fellow

Address
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Robin received his B.S. in physics and B.A. in knowledge ecology (student-designed major) from Seoul National University in 2021. He is primarily interested in how people interact at multiple levels, namely how interactions between individuals emerge into social groups and how these social groups affect individual-level interactions. To understand how people try to change other people’s view while retaining theirs, he is working with Simon DeDeo on a computational linguistics project to discover argument-making patterns in the wild. He is also enthusiastic about the statistical physics of complex systems and networks, having worked in the New England Complex Systems Institute and the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems prior to joining CMU.

Nhat Phan

Visiting Scholar

Address
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Nhat received his Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics in 2016 at the University of Lorraine, France where he had two-year postdoctoral experience afterward. His research interests include issues related to optimization applied in machine learning and decision making. At the lab, he performs research studies on developing Instance-based Learning models enhanced with reinforcement learning techniques in goal-seeking and collaboration tasks.

Walter Veit

Research Fellow

Address
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Walter Veit received his Bachelor's degree in Philosophy and Economics from the University of Bayreuth. Shortly afterwards, he undertook an MA in Philosophy of the Biological and cognitive Sciences at the University of Bristol. In 2020 he will start a PhD in philosophy of science at the University of Sydney under the supervision of Peter Godfrey-Smith and Paul Griffiths. He is currently working with Simon Dedeo as a pre-doctoral research fellow in the Laboratory for Social Minds at the Department of Social and Decision Sciences. His research interests involve evolution (both biological and cultural), cognitive science, theoretical biology, economic methodology, bioethics, and the philosophy of science. He is currently working on the metascience of consciousness.