Vanessa's Bio (tutor)

I was born in Boston and grew up in Atlanta in the USA. I was always obsessed with the natural world and decided to go to the University of Georgia to study genetics and evolutionary biology. But through a fantastical chain of epiphanies, I came out with a double degree in Anthropology and Linguistics and a minor in Arabic. Then I moved to Marrakech for 2 years (just to check if I could actually speak Arabic) and then I came to Amsterdam to get my MSc in Cognitive Science!

My master thesis was about a cleverly-constrained random number generator that I tricked into informing me about the dynamics of cultural evolution systems. Ok, somewhat more seriously, I'm interested in discovering laws in the dynamics of cultural transmission systems. Specifically, I look at how information gains structure when it is iterated through a population of agents and whether individual cognitive biases (like learning biases, production biases, etc.) and different properties of the social network (like population size, how much information one transmits, etc.) can predict this structure. Most of my results are disenheartingly abstract, but one experiment I ran with humans on mathematical function learning showed that a group of people is generally as smart as its stupidest member. That was fun. I did my thesis work under the supervision of Jelle Zuidema at the Institute for Language, Logic, and Computation (ILLC). You can read all about it here and here.

I'm currently employed by the UvA as a part-time researcher at the ILLC with Rens Bod and Jelle Zuidema and as assistant to different courses in the MBCS and master Psychology. Hopefully, I'll begin a PhD next year with Simon Kirby at the University of Edinburgh in the Language Evolution and Computation Research Unti (LEC) where I will continue to research the dynamics of cultural evolution systems. Additionally, I volunteer 2 days a week in the research department of Fairfood International, analyzing the sustainability of the wheat and sugar beet sector. So if you've got a burning question about wheat or sugar beets, don't be shy.

In my free time, I enjoy playing the banjo around town, making musical instruments, and drawing really detailed pictures of birds. I also used to have a weird pirate radio program called Radio Cognito, which we might be starting up again this year. If you're interested in participating, please contact me or your Cognito student association.