Dr. Tobias Gerstenberg leads the Causality in Cognition Lab (http://cicl.stanford.edu). The CiCL studies the role of causality in our understanding of the world, and of each other. In their research, they formalize people’s mental models as computational models that yield quantitative predictions about a wide range of situations. To test these predictions, the lab uses a combination of large-scale online experiments, interactive experiments in the lab, and eye-tracking experiments.

Dr. Tino Pleiner was born in the small town Zeitz near Leipzig in East Germany. Dr. Pleiner is a First Generation college graduate. He studied biochemistry and molecular biology in Leipzig and Göttingen, Germany. Dr. Pleiner holds a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Göttingen, Germany, where he did his lab work at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences with Dirk Görlich. He then escaped the rainy weather in Göttingen to do a postdoc with Rebecca Voorhees at Caltech in sunny Pasadena, California. 

Dr. Cowan's research looks to further our understanding of the pathophysiology of metabolic diseases, with the ultimate aim of improving patient testing and developing new therapeutic strategies.

The central question behind Dr. Stearns's work is how the centrosome and primary cilium control cell function and influence development, and how defects in these structures cause a remarkable range of human disease, ranging from cancer, polycystic kidney disease, and obesity, to neurocognitive defects including mental retardation, schizophrenia, and dyslexia.