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Due to the large quantity and high quality of applications, we decided to nearly double the number of tokens in the prize pool, creating four tiers of prizes.

Meet all the talented winners of the grants!


Anna Giarratana

@AOGiarratana



University of Zurich

"Hi! I am Anna Giarratana, and I am an MD-PhD student at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, currently doing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Zurich at the Zurich Center for Neuroeconomics. My postdoctoral work is in the lab of Dr. Philippe Tobler, investigating the effect that schizotypal personality traits have on the ability of people to adapt in visual and reward decision-making tasks. Our work has the potential to uncover novel information about the spectrum of schizophrenia, which future studies could build on to develop better diagnostics and targeted treatment interventions."


Pedro Conesa

@PJConesa



University of Murcia

"I am a second year PhD student in Psychology Educational at the University of Murcia (Spain). My research focuses on the interplay of executive functions, motivation and need-supportive teaching style in school context with a special emphasis in how to develop and train them in order to improve wellbeing and academic achievement in late elementary school students. The Gorilla Platform will help me to get to many differents schools located all around the country."


Soledad Picco

@solepicco_



Universidad de Buenos Aires

"I'm Soledad Picco, I'm a third year PhD student at the Institute of Physiology, Molecular Biology and Neuroscience (IFIByNE-UBA-CONICET) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. My study aims to analyse and deeply characterize the dynamics of memory reactivation and the following reconsolidation process of aversive and neutral memories."


Adam John Privitera



The University of Hong Kong

"I'm Adam John Privitera, a second year PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong. My research explores the relationship between second language experience, cognitive function, and academic performance. Currently, I am conducting a project in Mainland China (Shenzhen) focusing on the impact of English language experience in native Mandarin speaking high school students."


Tessa Clarkson



The University of Queensland

"My name is Tessa Clarkson, and I am a second-year PhD student at The University of Queensland, Australia. My research interests surround memory encoding strategies in older and younger adults. Specifically, I am researching how we encode self-relevant information better than other-relevant information (The Self-Reference Effect) and how reward may boost performance further. The findings may help us develop strategies to preserve memory in the elderly."


Ella Macaskill

@MacaskillElla



Victoria University of Wellington

"Hi! My name is Ella, and I’m a MSc student specialising in Cognitive and Behavioural Neuroscience at Victoria University of Wellington. My study investigates how deficits in face memory might contribute to developmental prosopagnosia, which is a condition in which people have difficulty recognising faces despite having no brain damage and typical intelligence."


Emma Libersky

@EmmaLibersky



University of Wisconsin-Madison

"I'm Emma Libersky, a second year PhD student in the Language Acquisition & Bilingualism Lab at University of Wisconsin-Madison. My project looks at the effect of speech disfluencies (i.e., the filler words "um" and "uh") on adult word learning."


Seeon Kim



Arizona State University

"I’m Seeon Kim and I am a second-year PhD student in Speech and Hearing Science at Arizona State University. My project is focusing on training of Mandarin tone recognition with amplitude envelope enhancement in cochlear implant simulation (PI: Dr. Xin Luo, the Cochlear Implant Lab at ASU). I would like to enhance speech recognition for cochlear implant users with novel auditory training paradigms.Thanks to Gorilla which allowed me to keep my study going even in the pandemic."


Ashley Doonan



Saint Louis University

"My name is Ashley Doonan, and I'm a second year PhD student in Cognitive Neuroscience at Saint Louis University. As a member of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Stress lab, I research the role of stress and cognition on health. My study seeks to understand the impact of chronic stress on risk-based decision making in the context of the pandemic. This research will examine how college age adults may be differentially impacted by the crisis and how this may influence their risk-based decisions about health and safety."


Mahsa Barzy

@BarzyMahsa



University of Reading

"My name is Mahsa Barzy. I am currently working as a postdoc in Dr Gray’s social perception lab at University of Reading. In our research, we are studying visual perception of social interactions and using the Gorilla Grant, I will be investigating whether we have specific mechanisms to detect and process social interactions viewed from third-person perspectives."


Michelle Hurst

@michelleahurst1



University of Chicago

"I'm Michelle Hurst, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago. In my current research, I am interested in how people reason about quantitative information and the relations among this information. In this study, I am investigating the development of relational reasoning and how it might vary across different relations (e.g., physical size versus numerical size), different representations (e.g., symbolic "4" vs. four items), and different levels of relational reasoning (i.e., which of two sets has more vs. which of two sets has a higher proportion)."