Our Research Team

Director

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Stella Christie

Research Chair
Tsinghua Laboratory of Brain and Intelligence 
Professor

Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University
Director
Tsinghua University Child Cognition Center

A native of Indonesia, Stella received her B.A. from Harvard University in 2004, and Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2010. Prior to moving to Tsinghua, she was a tenured associate professor at Swarthmore College.

Stella researches the Relational Mind: how cognitive systems learn relations and structures of the world. Using behavioral data from young human children and great apes, Stella’s work has discovered tantalizing similarities and differences between humans’ and other animals’ relational cognition. Eventually, her aim is to chart the precise learning algorithms that any mind uses to abstract relations. Having lived in six countries on all hemispheres, Stella holds a special interests in how relational reasoning is influenced by and influences language, culture, and social interactions.

In her spare time, Stella loves to scale mountains and languages—she currently speaks 5 languages

Postdoc

Honghong Bai

Dr. Honghong Bai is currently a post-doctoral researcher in collaboration with Prof. Stella Christie at Child Cognition Center, Tsinghua Lab of Brain and Intelligence. Dr. Bai received her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Technology from Southern China Normal University in 2011. After working as a network manager and IT supporter for a year, Dr. Bai started her master’s study in Developmental and Educational Psychology at Shaanxi Normal University in 2012 and graduated from there in 2015. Afterwards, she started her  Ph.D. traject with a focus on creativity in young children at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and obtained her doctoral degree in 2021. The research findings of her master’s and  Ph.D.’s projects have been published in national and international journals. During the  Ph.D. period, Dr. Bai has also worked as a part-time lecturer at Radboud University Nijmegen and University of Applied Sciences Utrecht.

Lab Manager

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Wenjia Tan

Hello, I'm Wenjia Tan, the assistant engineer and lab manager who is passionate about exploring how artificial intelligence can support human learning. I previously worked as a research assistant in the Lifelong Learning Lab at Tsinghua University. My current research focuses on comparing the accuracy and reliability of AI and human evaluations of children's learning performance, with the goal of developing more effective and human-centered AI learning tools. I am also exploring how social presence influences the behavior of children of different ages through a series of experiments and surveys. Outside of the lab, I enjoy Suzhou Pingtan and hiking. My goal is to improve the educational outcomes of children by developing innovative and effective learning tools that are accessible to all.

Graduate Students

高杨

Yang Gao

How does parents learn to parent? How do this learning influence children’s cognitive development? The broad aim of my research program is to understand the learning of parents and its impact on children’s development. My master research topic is on parental language’s impact on children’s analogical reasoning.

 
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Jinyun Lyu

Jinyun Lyu is a graduate student at the Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University. She has done some researches on children’s cross-modal correspondence, aesthetic preference, and children’s third-party punishment behavior. Currently, she is interested in children’s cognitive development, especially how play influences children’s cognitive development.

Qiuchen Ma

Qiuchen Ma earned her B.S. in Psychology from Tsinghua University in 2018. Now she is a graduate student majoring in Psychology. She would like to understand how children learn about social relationships.

Yijin Fang

Yijin Fang is a graduate student at the Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University. She is interested in the development of children’s learning and cognitive ability. Now she is doing research about children’s free play and exploration. 

徐源远

Yuanyuan Xu

Yuanyuan Xu is a graduate student at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Tsinghua University. She received a bachelor of Arts degree in Japanese language and a bachelor of Management in Administration from Tsinghua University in 2019. She is very interested in the relation between language and cognition. Her research interest lies in the field of cognitive linguistics, comparative linguistics, and the development of children’s language and cognition.

孟宁

Ning Meng

Meng Ning is a graduate student at the Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University. She graduated from Beijing Institute of Technology, majoring in Measurement Technology and Instrumentation. After that, she went to the United States to pursue a master’s degree in Industrial Engineering. With the backgrounds of interdisciplinary knowledge, she hopes to make great achievements in the academic field of applied psychology. Her main research interest lies in the field of children’s cognitive development, brain and artificial intelligence. Hopefully, based on scientific empirical research, a kind of effective method to cultivate and improve children’s optimism and resilience could be developed. Her goal is to help children not only have a healthy body, but also have the courage to overcome difficulties, the ability to make themselves happy, achieve their greatest potential, and finally have a flourishing life.

Huiying Yang

Huiying is a graduate student at Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University. She received her bachelor degree of science in psychology from Brown University and worked as a child educational content creator. She’s interested in studying children’s learning mechanism through play.

樊薇薇

Weiwei Fan

Fan Weiwei is a postgraduate of Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University. She is interested in how experience shapes children’s cognitive development and  learning processes. As a member of the Children’s Cognitive Research Center of Tsinghua University, she is involved in the study of children’s play.

Yufei Ren

Currently, she is a  Ph.D. student in the Department of Foreign Languages at Tsinghua University. Her interest lies in the psychological and neural mechanisms of language and cognition. She would like to explore the mystery of human emotion, cognition and language through experiments.

Qiang Zhou

Phsicolgical graduate student. He is interested in Child Sportage and cognitive development. Now, he focuses on developing an exercising model during Master Programme.

张峻皓

Junhao Zhang

Junhao Zhang is a graduate student at the Department of Psychology, Tsinghua Univerisity. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from Tsinghua University in 2021. His main interest is analogy and relational thinking, and how this affects human learning. Currently, he is working on a project about the cross-cultural differences in analogy reasoning, which tried to uncover the myth that Chinese/Easterners are better in thinking about relations. 

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Jianing Yin

Graduate from School of Architecture at Tsinghua University, second degree in psychology. I am very interested in the intersection between psychology and architecture and hope to use psychology knowledge as the basic support of design to improve the affordance of architectural space. Currently, I get involved in the related research of constructing child-friendly cities.

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Chanhee Koo

Chanhee is a graduate student studying Applied Psychology at Tsinghua University. She received her bachelor’s degree in cognitive science at Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests lie in how how learning can be fostered through play, and the interaction between design and cognitive development. In her free time, she enjoys golfing, street photography, and hanging out with her two poodles.

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Caroline Zhang

Caroline is a graduate student studying Applied Psychology at Tsinghua University. She received her bachelor’s degree in education at the University of Sydney. With her experience of children’s education, she found that children play with partners of different ages every day. Is it better to play with partners of the same age or mixed age? Her research interest is the age effects on children’s play behavior and cognitive development, and she hopes to provide meaningful enlightenment for early childhood education through scientific evidence

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Hina Gul

Hina is a graduate student studying Applied Psychology at Tsinghua University. She received her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Pakistan. Her research interest lies in how parents explain things when their children ask questions, and how these explanations are seen differently in various cultures. She wants to expand her knowledge in this field and hopes to contribute to our understanding of how parent-child interactions influence child development.

Undergraduate Students

静维

Joy Lee

Joy is majoring in psychology under school of social sciences, Tsinghua university as a class of 2024 undergraduate. She is generally interested in language cognition and social cognition. Besides the project about effects of bilingualism on children’s executive function that she is currently co-working on, she is also expected to explore her own research projects in THBI in her undergraduate years. 

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Yana Garankova

Yana is currently an international undergraduate student psychology major in the Department of Social Sciences at Tsinghua University, from the class of 2020. Her research interests revolve around child development and cognition, and she is also interested in the psychology of athletes. She hopes to one day become a child or athlete counseling psychologist and continue to advance research in this area.

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Haoxin Xu

Haoxin is majoring in psychology under school of social sciences, Tsinghua university as a class of 2024 undergraduate. He is fascinated about the philosophical question “How do people get to know about the world” and wishes to answer this question in a scientific way by studying children’s cognitive development. He is working in the research project about free play and wish to conduct his own research in the future. 

毛嘉熹

Anna Mao

Anna is an undergraduate in the Class of 2024 at Xinya College of Tsinghua University, majoring in psychology. Her interests lie in the fields of child language development and language & cognition, and draw upon the following questions: How does language affect the way we perceive the world? How can we in turn use language to shape the way we experience life? She is currently conducting research on the impact of explanation type on trust.

 

Researchers and Research Assistants

You Yilin 游一林

Yilin You

Yilin graduated from Beijing Institute of Technology with a B.A. in English. She is now a first-year graduate student at Beijing Foreign Studies University, majoring in linguistics. She is concerned with how people learn. Her academic interests include social cognition, language acquisition, and growth mindset. In her spare time, she likes to learn languages and watch musicals. 

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Aoxin Luo (Florrie)

Florrie just graduated from the University of Virginia with B.A. in Psychology and Cognitive Science double major. Now she is a full-time research assistant at the Child Cognition Center at Tsinghua University, working in projects about children creativity and cognitive beliefs. Her interests lie in children’s development of higher-level cognitions such as cognitive flexibility, learning and problem solving. In her spare time, she enjoys Jazz/Kpop dancing and thriller movies.

Alumni

Shao Shuai 邵率

Shuai Shao

PhD. candidate UCSD
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Sinuo Jia

Staff, Tsinghua University
耿越

Yue Geng

Master. UCSD
杨琪森

Qisen Yang

PhD. candidate Tsinghua University
张思琦

Siqi Zhang

PhD. candidate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
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Yuwei Xu

Undergraduate, NYU
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Yuanqing Wu

Undergraduate, Loughborough University
邓维宁

Weining Deng

Graduate, Tsinghua Unviersity
邱天

Tian Qiu

Master, Harvard
Shiyu Dong

Shiyu Dong

Master, HKU
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Jingyu Xi

PhD. candidate, Konstanz
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Zijin Tan

PhD. candidate UCSD

Shang Li

Master, UCLA

Hetao Zhang

Master, Oxford University

Lvshu Chen

Master, HKU

Haibo Sun

PhD. candidate, Brandeis University
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Haowen Xue

Master, UCL
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Kexin Que

PhD. candidate, Northwestern University
周星宇

Zhou Xingyu

Staff, China Energy Engineering Group Co.
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