Current PhD students
A.C. Harkness
A.C. Harkness, PhD Student in Cognitive/Social/Developmental Psychology, investigates how human-AI interaction is evolving and how it differs across user groups and task contexts. Projects includes studying how people interpret what AI chatbots present when in “thinking” mode, in comparison with how people interpret their human interactive partners’ spoken and textual indicators of processing before responding (like ums and disfluencies, or “hold on let me think”). A.C. has collaborated on and managed data in projects that involve analytics and thematic coding of open-ended textual data in studies about people’s shared understanding in remote settings (e.g., in an online songwriting group for mothers with symptoms of postnatal depression) and in-person settings (e.g., participants in music therapy sessions; visitors to the Royal College of Music museum in London). A.C. also applies background in the arts to building novel data visualizations about how people’s cognition overlaps and misaligns.
Simone Calbi
Simone Calbi, PhD candidate in Cognitive/Social/Developmental Psychology, is broadly interested in different modes of technologically-mediated communication, and how audio, voice and multilingualism mediate relationships and shared understanding. Her dissertation project focuses on how people use the AI-enabled search that has become a new default for internet browser users and what predicts their success—or not—at using it. She applies these interests in her work at the Brooklyn Public Library on how best to help members of the public who are encountering new technologies like AI chatbots to navigate their use.
Ali Bebry
Ali Bebry (she/her), PhD candidate in Clinical Psychology, investigates the cognitive processes behind uses of music for communication, building on her background in clinical and counseling psychology and contemporary music. Her dissertation project focuses on people’s overlapping (or not) understanding when they share music—how playlist receivers' interpretations of what a sharer intended to communicate align with what sharers report having meant—and how differently listeners with lyric focus think of what sharing music means. More broadly she is interested in other communications connected with musical activities like listening to music together (synchronously) and how music can support understanding in a therapeutic relationship. Better understanding these processes can inform the best uses of music as part of the therapeutic process.
Former Post-Docs
Professor Neta Spiro is Reader in Performance Science and Professor of Music Psychology at the Royal College of Music and an honorary Research Fellow at Imperial College London.
Amandine is Director of Research and Innovation at the Paris Conservatory (Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris), Paris, France
PhD Alumni
PhD, 2026
Assistant Professor, Manhattan University, New York
Dissertation: The Prevalence of Misunderstanding in Social Media and Factors that Predict Aligned Comprehension
Postdoctoral Fellow, New York University Langone Health, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Dissertation: How Visualizations Used in Mood Tracking Apps Can Affect Viewers' Comprehension of Represented Moods
Dissertation title: Musical Collaboration During Covid-19: How the remote music making process affects jazz musicians’ experience, communication, social dynamics, and musical decisions
PhD, 2026
Assistant Professor, Manhattan University, New York
Dissertation: The Prevalence of Misunderstanding in Social Media and Factors that Predict Aligned Comprehension
Other New School Alumni Collaborators
Human-computer interaction, specifically the ways in which honesty between people is affected by the mode of communication.