Alumni

Kellen Mrkva

Kellen is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Hankamer School of Business, Baylor University.

Previously, Kellen was a postdoc with Eric Johnson at Columbia and received his PhD from the University of Colorado. His work has been featured in several academic journals and other outlets including Journal of Marketing, Psychological Science, JPSP, JEP:G, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and Harvard Business Review. He studies judgment and decision making in many contexts including in the contexts of consumer spending, consumer financial decision making, digital marketing, and choice architecture (nudges and retail “dark patterns”). His recent research usually includes big data and/or field experiments in addition to online/lab experiments.

• CV 
• Personal Research Webpage

Antonia Krefeld-Schwalb

Antonia is a researcher in Marketing and an assistant professor at Rotterdam School of Management. 

With her training in cognitive science and marketing, her research lies at the intersection of the two fields. She uses methods from cognitive science, such as process measurements (mouse and eye tracking) and computational models. But she applies these methods to gain an understanding of consumer behavior and managerial decision making. She tries to optimize methods to predict behavior outside the experimental laboratory going beyond describing the behavior in the experimental setup alone.

If you are interested in my research or want to get in touch! I'd love to talk.

Nathaniel Posner (Lab Manager 2019-2021)

Nathaniel (or Nate) is a PhD Student in Marketing at Columbia Business School.  He is interested in choice architecture, prosocial giving, and creativity. He graduated with a BA in psychology (minor in economics) from Vassar College in 2019, and worked at CDS from 2019 to 2021. 

Shannon Duncan (Associate Director 2017-2019, Lab Manager 2016-2017) 

Shannon holds a BA in Psychology from Marist College and a MS in Neuroscience from Teachers College at Columbia. Her previous research experience includes working at the Emotion and Language Lab at Marist where she worked on projects investigating the psychophysical relationship between cursing and pain tolerance. For her undergraduate thesis, she conducted an experiment on the association between binge eating and compulsive buying behaviors in college students. Her master's thesis explored the ability of choice architecture, implied endorsement and query theory to change workplace wellness program uptake.  She worked as a research assistant at CDS from 2014 to 2016. Her research interests include risky behavior, health decisions, consumer behavior, impulsivity, choice architecture, decision-making process tracing and neuroeconomics. As of Fall 2019 she is attending the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania for her PhD in Marketing. 

Brian Huh (Lab Manager 2015-2017) 

Brian holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Harvard University. He studies decision-making, behavioral science, and neuroscience with a focus on consumer behavior. Other interests include the intersection of affective and social psychology in neuroscience. Past research appointments are research assistant and faculty aide at Harvard in the Affective Neuroscience & Development Lab with Leah Somerville (2013-15) and the Mental Control Lab with Daniel Wegner (2011-13). Brian also spent summers at Stanford as a research collaborator in the Psychophysiology Lab with James Gross (2013), and interned at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business for Ayelet Fishbach, Oleg Urminsky, and Abigail Sussman in the behavioral science and marketing unit. He is an avid runner, sailor, and traveler. He hopes to visit space one day.  He is currently a Lab Manager at USC Marshall. 

Lilly Kofler (SUSSTAIN Research Coordinator 2015-2017) 

As an undergraduate at the University of Miami, Lilly worked on problems of self-control and the effects of physical effort on intertemporal trade-offs. She then received an M.A. in social science from the University of Chicago where she examined expected value heuristics and probability-based choice. Lilly’s work with SUSSTAIN focuses on applying what she knows from behavioral economics to real decision environments with the goal of helping people make more environmentally conscientious decisions.  More broadly, Lilly is interested in how people make decisions about value over time, where value can be something concrete with tangible returns (e.g., money) or can represent a more abstract construct with intangible outcomes (e.g., the environment). She worked as a behavioral scientist at Publicis, and is now Head of Vibes and Awareness.

Salah Chafik (Lab Manager 2014-2016)

Salah holds a BA in International Relations and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania. His experience as a Research Assistant includes positions at Innovations for Poverty Action conducting a randomized controlled trial (RTC) impact evaluation on a rural enterprise support project in Morocco, and at the Earth Institute onboard a national level facility mapping project in Nigeria. Having a background in international development, Salah is particularly interested in decision making under risk, uncertainty, and poverty. He will be attending UCL for Economics. 

Daniel Wall (Lab Manager 2013-2015)

Dan has graduated with a BS in Industrial Engineering from Penn State and holds an MS in Evolutionary Psychology from Brunel University. For his masters thesis, he performed a behavioral economic experiment which investigated how individual differences affect rejection thresholds in the Ultimatum Game. He is currently attending Rutgers University for a Joint PhD in Psychology and Marketing.

Jie Gao (Post-Doc)

Jie is currently a researcher at ETS.

H.Min Bang (Research Coordinator)

Min graduated from Indiana University Bloomington majoring in Psychology and earned her master’s degree from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is interested in managerial decision making and organizational behavior research. She completed PhD in Management at Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, and now works as a Project Leader at PDS Holdings.

Zeynep Enkavi (Lab Coordinator 2012-2014)

Zeynep graduated from the University of Pennsylvania majoring in Cognitive Science and German Studies. She completed her undergraduate honors thesis under the supervision of Prof. Kable and conducted experiments in intertemporal choice settings using eyetracking. Her research interests include cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying judgment and decision making. She completed her PhD in Psychology at Stanford and is now a post-doc at Caltech.

Stephen Atlas (Graduate Student 2008-2013)

Stephen completed his PhD in Marketing at Columbia. His research interests include intertemporal choice, financial decision making, mental accounting, judgment and decision making and social norms. Stephen is currently an Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Rhode Island College of Business

Jonathan Westfall (Postdoc 2009-2012)

Jon is now a professor, researcher and technologist working in Shreveport, Louisiana, at Centenary College of Louisiana. He teaches a variety of courses in psychology, from introduction to psychology to upper-level seminars. His current research focuses on the variables individuals use when making economic and consumer finance decisions, specifically strength of handedness, a variable correlated with a number of decision-making and cognitive psychology tasks and measures. Dr. Westfall also conducts research on consumer financial decision making, and applications to both marketing and public policy. His current appointment is as a Visiting Assistant Professor. For more information click here.

Ye Li (Postdoc 2009-2012)

Ye Li is currently an assistant professor of management at University of California Riverside. Visit personal website.

Hamdan Azhar (Research Assistant 2011-2012)

Hamdan Azhar is a New York-based writer and statistician. He earned his master's in biostatistics from the University of Michigan and has completed a year of doctoral coursework in neuroscience at the University of Chicago. He has held research positions at the United Nations (in statistical demography), at the University of Michigan (in cognitive neuroscience), and at Columbia Business School (in decision-making).

Margaret Lee (Lab Coordinator 2010-2012)

Margaret is now a PhD student at the London Business School studying organizational behavior.

Cindy Kim (Research Coordinator 2010-2012)

Cindy is now a research coordinator at Stanford University Department of Psychology.

Galen Treuer (Research Assistant 2010-2012)

Galen is now a PhD student at the University of Miami.

Eric Schoenberg (Associate Director 2010-2011)

Professor Schoenberg studies the psychology of money, with a particular emphasis on intergenerational wealth transfers and behavior in financial markets. His career has encompassed both practical experience and theoretical study in business, as Managing Director and Chief Knowledge Officer of Broadview International, a boutique investment bank; in government, as a Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. State Department; and in academia, having received a PhD in Psychology from Columbia University, an MBA in Decision Science from the Wharton School, an MSE in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and an AB in Biology from Harvard.

Kirstin Appelt (Postdoc & Research Fellow 2004-2011)

Kirstin is broadly interested in how consumers make decisions and the sometimes surprising factors that affect these decisions. Her research has investigated consumer choice in three domains (retirement financial decision making, healthcare decision making, and interpersonal negotiations) and from two perspectives (choice architecture and individual differences). After working for Google as  People Analyst she is now a Decision Science Research Consultant at Pacific Business Group on health and a Usability Subject Matter Expert at California Health Benefit Exchange. Visit her website.

Martine Baldassi (Lab Coordinator 2008-2011)

Martine currently works as a psychologist at the CLSC in Montreal.

Seoungwoo Lee (Research Assistant 2009-2011)

Seoungwoo holds an undergraduate degree in industrial engineering from Korea University and a master’s degree in operations research from Columbia University. His research interests include quantitative modeling, consumer choice and Bayesian statistics in marketing.

Hiro Kotabe (Research Assistant 2009-2011)

Hiro is now a PhD student at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Rachel Meng (Summer Interns 2011)

Rachel is now a PhD student at Columbia Business School.

Bernd Figner (Postdoc 2006-2010)

Dr. Figner's is now Assistant Professor at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. His research is concerned with the interplay of affective and deliberative processes in decision making, specifically in the areas of risky decision making and intertemporal choice. This work investigates which situational and personal characteristics lead to differential involvement of affective versus deliberative processes (e.g., static versus dynamic choice situations), how affect-based versus deliberative decisions differ in the underlying processes such as information use, and how the resulting decisions differ (e.g., with respect to risk taking or increased impulsiveness). Dr. Figner studies the development of these processes across the lifespan, with a focus on the changes that occur during the transitions from childhood to adolescence and from adolescence to adulthood. He uses behavioral and physiological measures as well as brain imaging and brain stimulation techniques. He is a research scientist at the Center for Decision Sciences and the Department of Psychology, sponsored by grants from the US and Swiss National Science Foundations.  

Issac Dinner (PhD Student 2005 - 2010)

Issac is now an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Isaac Dinner´s research interests lie in using quantitative models to value marketing communications with customers and financial markets. His research projects include the value implications of corporate branding in mergers, valuing corporate level marketing spending, measuring online-offline advertising effects, and the role of non-financial information in communicating with the financial markets. See Isaac's faculty webpage for more information. 

Eustace Hsu (Research Assistant 2009-2010)

Eustace is now a graduate student at the University of Southern California studying psychology. He is part of Professor John Monterosso’s Self-Control Neuroscience Research Lab.

Annie Ma (Research Assistant 2009-2010)

Annie is now an associate at Google in San Francisco, CA. She studied economics and psychology at Columbia. 

Julie Zelmanova (Research Assistant 2009-2010)

Julie is a Clinical Research Coordinator at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.  She is currently applying to PhD programs.

Alex DePaoli (Summer Intern 2010)

Alex is currently a PhD student at Stanford Graduate School of Business studying organizational behavior.

Raluca Ursu (Summer Intern 2010)

Raluca is now an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business.   

Jing Qian (Postdoc 2008-2009)

Jing is now an Assistant Professor in Psychology at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.  Her current research focuses on dynamic decision making in groups and social cognition. See Jing's faculty webpage for more information. 

Peter Jarnebrant (PhD Student 2004-2009)

Peter is now Assistant Professor at ESMT European School of Management and Technology while he finishes his Ph.D. in Marketing from Columbia University. He previously was a fellow of the American-Scandinavian Foundation and of the Olin Foundation, and in 2007 he was awarded a fellowship with the American Marketing Association’s Doctoral Consortium. His research primarily concerns consumer behavior, particularly how consumers gain store information and its influence on their choices. 

Amy Krosch (Lab Manager 2006-2009)

Amy is now an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Cornell University.  Before that, she was a postdoc at Harvard and completed her PhD at New York University examining economic scarcity effects on discrimination through multiple levels of social perception. Her research interests include distributive justice, social neuroscience, race-bias, prejudice, and intergroup relations. She is a member of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Society for Social Neuroscience, and the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society.

Ryan O. Murphy (Postdoc and Lab Manager 2005-2008) 

Ryan is now Chair and Assistant Professor of Decision Theory and Behavioral Game Theory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich. His research examines decision-making in interdependent situations, how decisions are made in risky and dynamic environments, and developing quantitative models to describe and predict behavior in these environments.

Martijn Willemsen (Postdoc 2004-2006)

Martijn Willemsen is assistant professor in the Human-Technology Interaction group at the school of Innovation Sciences at the Eindhoven University of Technology. He holds a masters degree in Electrical Engineering and in Technology and Society from Eindhoven University of Technology. After obtaining his Ph.D. in the psychology of decision making, he obtained a Veni-grant from NWO, the Dutch national science foundation. He worked as a postdoc at Columbia University, where he developed, together with Eric Johnson, an online tool for studying information acquisition processes of decision makers, mouselabWEB. Currently, Martijn teaches in the bachelor's program in Psychology and Technology and the master's program in Human-Technology Interaction at Eindhoven University of Technology. Visit his website.

Mary Steffel (Research Assistant 2003-2004) 

Mary is now an assistant professor of marketing at the Lindner College of Business at University of Cincinnati. She completed her marketing PhD at The University of Florida and her psychology PhD at Princeton University. Her research is at the interface of self and social perception and judgment and decision making, focusing on developing a better understanding of how decision making functions in a broader social context. She studies how people gauge their own and others’ preferences, how actors and observers come to differ in the judgments and choices they make, how comparison standards and other contextual factors impact the judgments and choices people make for themselves and others, and what predicts when people turn to others to help them make decisions. Her research on social comparison in decisions for others was awarded the 2012 Society of Consumer Psychology dissertation proposal award. She teaches consumer behavior.

Dan Goldstein (Postdoc and Lab Manager 2002) 

Dan is now a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in New York City and Honorary Research Fellow at London Business School in the UK. He is also the Editor of Decision Science News. His research emphasizes how psychology and decision making relate to business and policy. See Dan's personal webpage for more information. 

Daniel R. Ames (Postdoc 2000-2002)

Daniel is now Associate Professor of Management at Columbia Business School as well as Sanford C. Bernstein Associate Professor of Leadership and Ethics in the Management Division of Columbia Business School. His research primarily concerns social judgment and behavior. Specifically, he is interested in how people "read minds" to make inferences about what others think. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology and Associate Director of the Center for Decision Sciences at Columbia University and a Postdoctoral Fellow and Director of the Behavioral Lab at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He is affiliated with the Academy of Management, American Psychological Association, American Psychological Society, International Association for Conflict Management, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Society for Judgment and Decision Making.