Lab Alumni

Simon Xu (Associate Director, 2021-2023)

Simon joined CDS as a Research Assistant in 2020, and is interested in choice architecture, consumer behavior, and statistical methods in financial, sustainability, and digital domains. Simon graduated from Columbia University in 2021, and has a background in Psychology (Neuroscience) and Statistics. At Columbia, Simon has also worked with the CORE Lab (Construction, Organization, and Reactivation of Experience) with Lila Davachi and Monika Riegel examining psychophysiological differences in memory encoding and retrieval by emotion, and the Neuropsychopharmacology Lab under Carl Hart and Ciara A. Torres examining prenatal cannabis exposure on cognitive function and development.

Ibitayo Fadayomi (Lab Manager, 2021 - 2023)

Ibitayo (Ibi) is a Phd Student in Behavioral Marketing at Chicago Booth. Ibi graduated from the University of Michigan ‘21 with a double B.S. in Psychology and Cognitive Sciences. During his time at Michigan, he worked in several labs, including the Minds, Math, and Machine lab under Jun Zhang and the Culture, Society, and Social Perception lab under Shinobu Kitayama. His honors thesis under Ethan Kross looked at differences in the social-cognitive mechanisms that underlie moral decision making in close relationships. His interests are in choice architecture, behavior change, and social perception.

Antonia Krefeld-Schwalb (Postdoc, 2019-2021)

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.

Kellen Mrkva (Postdoc, 2018-2021)

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

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.

Crystal Reeck (Postdoc, 2013-2015)

Dr. Crystal Reeck is a tenured Associate Professor at the Fox School of Business, where she also serves as the Associate Director of the Center for Applied Research in Decision Making. She completed both her Bachelor's and Master's degrees at Stanford University, and she holds a Ph.D. in psychology and neuroscience from Duke University. She joined the faculty from Columbia Business School, where she served as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Decision Making and Negotiations Cross Disciplinary area.

Daniel Wall (Lab Manager, 2013-2015)

Dan is currently an Associate at DE Shaw. Previously he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at UPenn. He holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon. Dan received an MS in Evolutionary Psychology from Brunel University and graduated with a BS in Industrial Engineering from Penn State University.

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 Associate Professor of Management and Marketing at University of California Riverside.

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 Appelt is the Research Director of Decisions Insights for Business & Society (UBC-DIBS), the Academic Director of the Advanced Professional Certificate in Behavioural Insights, and the Research Director for the Dhillon Centre for Business Ethics, all at the University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business. Her research explores how to use choice architecture to help make it easier for us to choose the best decisions for ourselves, society, and the planet. Kirstin also serves as a behavioural science consultant for organizations including the BC Behavioural Insights Group (BC BIG), BC Hydro, the California Health Benefit Exchange (Covered California), Fraser Health, Google, the Pacific Business Group on Health (PBGH), and WorkSafeBC.

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)

Isaac Dinner research interests lie in causal inference, attribution models, customer analytics, multichannel management and corporate branding. His research has been published in the Harvard Business Review, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of International Business Studies and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. He is currently the Director of Econometric Modeling at Indeed, and previously served on the faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill and IE Business School in Madrid.

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 an Associate Teaching Professor of Marketing at Northeastern University's D’Amore-McKim School of Business, where he teaches undergraduate Introduction to Marketing and Digital Marketing. He received his PhD from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and his research focuses on consumer behavior, predominantly with emphasis on how emotion and affect influence consumers' judgment and decision making. His current work explores the impacts of emotion in consumer reasoning, multi-attribute choice, and satiation.

Raluca Ursu (Summer Intern, 2010)

Raluca Ursu is an Associate Professor of Marketing at New York University Stern School of Business. Professor Ursu’s research interests focus on the areas of consumer search and information acquisition techniques, with an emphasis on online markets. Her research tries to understand how consumers gather information about products and make choices in markets where they are faced with an overwhelming number of product options, but limited resources to evaluate them. 

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 an Associate Professor at the Department of Marketing of BI Norwegian Business School, and he holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from Columbia University. He previously was an Assistant Professor at ESMT European School of Management and Technology, 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 currently an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. Her lab currently examines how decision makers' goals and motivations influence their behavior toward members of their own and other groups. The lab takes a multilevel approach to research, integrating ideas and methods from experimental social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral decision-making, and psychophysics.

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

Ryan currently works in the finance industry as the Global Head of Behavioral Sciences at Morningstar. Previously he was the Chair of Decision Theory and Behavioral Game Theory at the ETH Zürich, and a visiting professor in the Economics Department of the University of Zürich. His research focuses on how people make decisions about risk, money, and investing.  His current work centers on measuring people's preferences and forecasts, goal-centric investment planning, and dynamic portfolio optimization methods.

Martijn Willemsen (Postdoc, 2004-2006)

Martijn Willemsen is an Associate Professor in the Human-Technology Interaction group at the school of Innovation Sciences at the Eindhoven University of Technology and also works as the principle investigator of the Recommender LAB at the Jheronimous Academy of Data Science in Den Bosch. 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 and the data science BSc and MSc programs of JADS.

Mary Steffel (Research Assistant, 2003-2004)

Mary Steffel is an associate professor of marketing at the D'Amore-McKim School of Business and affiliated faculty at the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University. She is also an academic affiliate in the Office of Evaluation Sciences at the General Services Administration and has served as a fellow on the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. Mary holds a Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Florida, a Ph.D. in psychology from Princeton University, and a B.A. in psychology from Columbia University.

Dan Goldstein (Postdoc and Lab Manager, 2002)

Dan Goldstein is a Senior Principal Research Manager and local leader at Microsoft Research New York City and a Distinguished Scholar at Wharton. Prior to Microsoft, Dan was a professor at London Business School and Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo Research. Dan received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has also taught or researched at Wharton, Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, and the Max Planck Institute. Dan was President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making.

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.

Gretchen Chapman (Postdoc, 1990-1992)

Gretchen Chapman has been a Social & Decision Sciences Professor at Carnegie Mellon University since 2017. Prior to joining the faculty at CMU, Dr. Chapman was a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University where she served as Department Chair of Psychology and Acting Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Science.  She is the recipient of an APA early career award and a NJ Psychological Association Distinguished Research Award, a fellow of APA and APS.  She is a former senior editor at Psychological Science, a past president of the Society for Judgment & Decision Making, the author of  more than 100 journal articles, and the recipient of 20 years of continuous external funding. Her research focuses on understanding psychological processes in decision-making and designing interventions to promote health and prosocial behavior, such as vaccination and blood donation. She holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and an A.B. in Psychology from Bryn Mawr College.