Congratulations to our 2025 Certificate Program graduates Cheng Liu and Sarah Kovalaskas best of luck!
Current Certificate Students
Alexis Young
Alexis Young is a doctoral student in Emory’s English department focusing on addiction, mental health, and disability theory in contemporary American literature. Her research explores the identity-forming, narrative, and political power of addiction and drug use. She is also interested in how advances in neurobiology, especially genetics and behaviorism, impact how culture and law understand addiction, drug use, and neurodiversity. Prior to Emory, Alexis completed an MA in English with a certificate in Disability Studies at Georgetown University and a BA in English and History at the University of Virginia.
Yeohong Yoon is a doctoral student in Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, working with Daniel McCarthy. Prior to pursuing his doctoral degree, he earned his BBA and MS in Business (Marketing) from Yonsei University. Yeohong's research focuses on analyzing spending behavior using credit card data, and he has collaborated with multiple companies in South Korea. His works have been published in the International Journal of Advertising, Industrial Marketing Management, and Journal of Interactive Marketing.
Federico (Fede) Sánchez Vargas is a PhD student in biological anthropology. He is broadly interested in the evolution of social cognition, the potentially reciprocal relationship between different domains of cognition and positioning in the social hierarchy, and the developmental sources of individual variation in cognitive ability across multiple domains. Why have capuchins convergently evolved to be the “apes of the New World”, and what might this be able to tell us about the specific conditions leading to the evolution of similar cognitive profiles in phylogenetically distant species? In what ways do capuchins conceptualize their physical environment and the other social actors in it in ways uniquely shaped by their ecology and evolutionary history? He hopes to incorporate cognitive experiments in the wild to investigate natural inter-individual variation in the ability to solve novel problems.
Prior to attending Emory, Fede completed a B.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, a B.A. in Psychology, and a certificate in cultural anthropology at the University of Rochester in New York. His previous research includes characterizing the manipulation of behavior in a primitively eusocial wasp by its obligate endoparasite, exploring the effects of individual manipulation on colony dynamics, and investigating social cognition and attention in marmoset monkeys using novel machine vision methods.
Sophie Kurilla is a doctoral student in Emory's Anthropology department. She is broadly interested in the evolutionary origins of extended development in primates, with research focused on developmental variation and maternal strategies in East African chimpanzees. Through comparative analyses across chimpanzee communities, her work aims to examine the factors that shape developmental trajectories and later-life outcomes.
Prior to pursuing a doctoral degree, Sophie completed a B.S. in Biology at Tufts University, where she worked with long-term data from the Kibale Chimpanzee Project to study adult play behavior in wild chimpanzees. Additionally, she co-founded and served as the field site manager of the Nature’s Valley Baboon Project, a behavioral research and conservation initiative focused on wild chacma baboons in South Africa.
Shantanu Katiyar is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology at Emory University, specializing in the Biological Anthropology track. His academic background is in prehistoric archaeology, with research experience across both Oldowan and Acheulean stone tool technologies. Broadly, he is interested in the learning processes behind stone tool production, with a particular focus on how novices acquire knapping skills, the role of material constraints in shaping technological choices, and the cognitive implications of early stone toolmaking. His work combines experimental archaeology, lithic analysis, and interdisciplinary perspectives from cognitive science to better understand the evolution of technology in our prehistoric past.
Joshua Harrington is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Philosophy at Emory University, specializing in Existentialism and Critical Philosophy of Race. He received his B.A. in Philosophy at the University of Michigan, where he wrote his honors thesis on Foucault. His research explores our experience of agency, focusing on the various parts of our existence that constrain and ground our understanding of freedom. His dissertation addresses this question within the context of depression and our experience of emotional embodiment.
Caius Gibeily is a doctoral student in the Neuroscience graduate program interested in combining techniques in molecular and computational neuroscience to explore typical brain development and aging. He previously read molecular and cell biology at the University of St Andrews, UK, and completed an MSc Neuroscience at Oxford. His previous research projects have explored questions in neurodevelopment and degenerative disease, including understanding the role of VIP+ inhibitory interneuron maturation in sensory processing in barrel cortex and developing a microfluidic platform for interrogating the neuromodulatory landscape in models of Parkinson’s Disease.
Nicole Furgala is a doctoral student in Biological Anthropology interested in the evolutionary origins of social cognition using interdisciplinary methods across anthropology and comparative cognition. Her research investigates perspective-taking and mental state attribution in capuchin monkeys by developing experimental methodologies in captive capuchins that can also be translated to the wild. This provides a multi-species comparison between tufted capuchins in captivity, and white faced capuchins at the Capuchins de Taboga field site in Costa Rica, while considering both experimental control and ecological validity. She aims to explore the evolution of Theory of Mind as it relates to distinctly human cognition, as well as the socio-ecological pressures shaping species-specific social cognition. For an additional comparative perspective, she also investigates chimpanzee social and technical development.
Prior to coming to Emory, Nicole completed her MSc in Evolutionary and Comparative Psychology from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where she studied species-specific play behaviors across chimpanzee and bonobo development, and completed her BAS in Zoology and Psychology from the University of Guelph, Canada.
Evan Cunningham is a doctoral student in Biological Anthropology broadly interested in behavioral endocrinology and evolution. He is interested in how cognitive processes are influenced by socialecological and biological factors and is studying social learning in capuchin monkeys at the Capuchins de Taboga field site in Costa Rica. He is also interested in how behavioral flexibility affects species' abilities to adapt to changing anthropogenic ecologies, and what the consequences of these processes may be for biological evolution. Finally, he studies the politics of knowledge construction by looking at the cultural forces that affect how science is studied. To this end, Evan has conducted research on how same-sex sexual behavior has been studied in non-human primates over the last century.
Prior to coming to Emory, Evan received a B.A. in Human Biology from Stanford University, conducted research through Durham University on sleeping site use by chacma baboons in an anthropogenic environment in South Africa, and spent several years teaching high school and college Biology.
Mariana is a Fulbright doctoral student in Biological Anthropology interested in the evolutionary origins of complex social cognitive traits — what are the cognitive mechanisms underlying the evolution of language, how do language and sociality influence cultural transmission, and what neural correlations can be made between such behaviors? Through a comparative approach, drawing parallels between humans and nonhuman primates, Mariana hopes to investigate the evolutionary connections between social learning, language evolution and toolmaking.
Prior to joining Emory, Mariana completed her MSc in Health Sciences (concentration in Neuroscience) and her BSc and Licentiate teaching degree in Biology from the University of Brasilia, in Brazil. She has experience in the areas of Neurophysiology, Psychopharmacology and Animal Behavior, and has conducted prior research on animal models of psychiatric disorders.
Jo Abillama (she/they) is a doctoral student in Cultural Anthropology interested in the lived experiences of autistic adults. How do autistic adults navigate culturally and socially imposed neuronormativity? How can scientific discourse respond to the demands of autistic self-advocates to avoid further stigmatization, pathologization, and medicalization of neurodivergent minds? They are also interested in arts-based research methodologies, specifically performance ethnography, as they see in them the potential to both decolonize knowledge production and encourage engagement with a non-academic public.
Prior to joining Emory, Jo completed a B.A. in Psychology at the American University of Beirut, an MA in Drama Therapy at Kansas State University, and an MA in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the Lebanese American University. She has also conducted qualitative research on the intersection of gender divergence and neurodivergence and been part of the research project "Mapping the Production of Knowledge on Women and Gender in the Arab region".
