Aaron Baker

Cooperation Lab

Since the fall of 2020, I have been working as a senior research assistant and lab coordinator for the Cooperation Lab at Boston College with Dr. Katherine McAuliffe. This has given me the opportunity to get involved in each part of the research process and work with inspired and welcoming researchers. Beyond handling the administrative responsibilities of the lab and making sure everything is running smoothly, I have studied how children acquire virtuous inclinations and dabbled in modeling norm updating. I have acquired valuable skills for conducting behavioral experiments and managing the logistics of a research team.

For more information about the lab visit www.bccooperationlab.com.
Image: McGuinn Hall on Chestnut Hill campus at Boston College

Cognitive Development and Learning Lab

In my senior year at Berkeley I worked as a research assistant in Dr. Alison Gopnik's lab. Beyond my typical RA duties, I was primarily involved in Eliza Kosoy's project drawing connections between children's exploration strategies and reinforcement learning algorithms. My time with the lab taught me about recruiting and task administration on-site at children’s museums and exposed me to computational approaches in developmental psychology.

For more information about the lab visit www.gopniklab.berkeley.edu.
Image: Berkeley Way West near downtown Berkeley

The Beauty and Joy of Computing

One of the requirements of cognitive science majors at Berkeley is to take computer science classes that are infamous among the student body for their rigor. Terrified, and without any coding experience, I decided I ought to take the intro course – CS10 – before the required set. The class made such an impression on me that I decided I would take computer science courses for the rest of my time in undergrad and signed up to teach the course that inspired me to do so. During my time with CS10, I was a academic intern for one semester, teaching assistant for three, and finally the instructor in charge of the summer session along with my friend Maxson Yang. With plenty of teaching experience between us, we reconstructed the curriculum to accomodate the online COVID format. We also handled lectures, exams, projects, assignments, and managed a team of teaching assistants and academic interns to deliver a very well-received course.

To see the course website of our summer session, visit cs10.org/su20.
Image: Soda Hall on north side of UC Berkeley campus.

Translational Imaging Center

As part of an undergraduate research fellowship, I worked with Dr. Scott Fraser and the Translational Imaging Center at USC. This was a particularly enlightening experience because it afforded me the opportunity to interact with people from a wide range of disciplines – physicists, engineers, microbiologists, chemists, and neurobiologists. With this group of people all in one conference room, lab meetings proved to be... stimulating. My project involved repurposing beautiful 4D biofluorescent neuroimaging data to look for patterns of neural activation across sleep and wake zebrafish bouts. In addition to the breadth of research I was exposed to, I am grateful for the technical experience and research savvy that I earned from my time with the lab.

For more information about the lab visit bioimage.usc.edu.
Image: Michelson Hall on USC's campus in Downtown LA

AARON BAKER