Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Chair
Professor, Dept. of Psychology

Curriculum Vitae
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Email: ebrannon@sas.upenn.edu
Department Link: UPenn Department of Psychology

Dr. Elizabeth M. Brannon graduated Summa Cum Laude from The University of Pennsylvania, where she received her B.A. in Physical Anthropology in 1992. She received a Masters degree in Anthropology and a PhD in Psychology from Columbia University. She has been at Duke in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience since the year 2000 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2008 and Full Professor in 2012. She is currently the Director of Graduate Studies for the Cognitive Neuroscience Admitting Program (CNAP) and the head of the developmental area within P&N. She maintains a secondary appointment in the department of Evolutionary Anthropology.

She has received numerous academic awards and honors including the Young Investigator Award from The Society for Experimental Psychology, a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, a Merck Scholar Award, and a James McDonnell Scholar Award. She is on the editorial board of Cognition, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, Psychological Science, and Infancy. Dr. Brannon’s research is funded by The National Institutes of Health and The National Science Foundation. She teaches courses on cognitive development and comparative psychology and maintains two laboratories focused on quantitative cognition in nonhuman primates and human infants.

Chuyan’s research interests lie primarily in the foundations of mathematical thought. She received her B.S. in Psychology at Beijing Normal University in 2019, where she researched attention and cognitive development. She previously worked in the Brain Development Lab at Vanderbilt University under Dr. James Booth studying neural correlates of longitudinal improvement in arithmetic. Currently, she is particularly interested in how basic intuitions connect to highly abstract mathematical concepts. Her present work focuses on examining whether non-symbolic, approximate calculation can function as a bridge between our Approximate Number System and symbolic mathematics for both children and adults. She is also interested in exploring possible parallels of cognitive and neural processes involved in representing number, space and time on the fundamental nature of quantity.