Dr. Robert Hawkins is interested in the cognitive mechanisms that allow people to flexibly communicate, collaborate, and coordinate with one another in social interactions. He received his PhD in Psychology from Stanford University in 2019 and was a C.V. Starr Fellow at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute prior to starting as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Stanford in 2024.

Dr. Hawkins's lab investigates the computational principles underlying human communication, particularly (1) how speakers and listeners establish common ground and coordinate on a shared understanding, and (2) how social and pragmatic reasoning shapes language production and comprehension in context. To address these questions, they develop computational models, design large-scale behavioral experiments, and analyze large corpora of natural language. Their research intersects linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, and artificial intelligence, with applications to understanding and improving human-AI interaction in medical settings.