Jennifer Hu, PhD

Lab Director

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I am an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science and member of the Data Science and AI Institute at Johns Hopkins. My research aims to understand the computational and cognitive principles that underlie human language.

John R. Starr, PhD

Postdoc (from Summer 2026)

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University, where I work with Jennifer Hu. Previously, I completed my PhD in the Department of Linguistics at Cornell University. My research examines how people incrementally process language in context, often using a combination of experimental methods and computational modeling to understand their behavior.

Abhinav Patil

PhD student

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I am a first year Ph.D. student in the Cognitive Science department at Johns Hopkins advised by Jennifer Hu. Previously, I completed a master's in computational linguistics at the University of Washington. My research focuses on understanding how linguistic computation is implemented in humans and language models, especially in a comparative context.

Rutva Pandya

Master's student

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I am a Master’s student in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, advised by Jennifer Hu. Previously, I completed my B.S. in Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. My research examines reasoning in human and machine intelligence to understand how they align and diverge to improve the interpretability of language models.

Sirisha Gudavalli

Rotation student

I am a first-year Ph.D. student in the Neuroscience program at Johns Hopkins, currently rotating with Jennifer Hu. Previously, I completed my B.S. in Computation and Neural Systems at Caltech. During my rotation, I am modeling how humans and RL agents use silence and timing to communicate in the cooperative game “The Mind."