Recognizing Excellence: 2026 CCBS Graduate Research Awardees
The Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences is proud to announce the recipients of this year's Summer Graduate Research Awards.
Each year, the Center supports outstanding graduate research across The Ohio State University through our competitive summer funding program. These awards are granted to exceptional graduate students who showcase academic excellence and innovation in the cognitive and brain sciences. This program fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and provides meaningful financial support to advance graduate scholarship.
In the 2026 award cycle 6 graduate students received the CCBS Summer Graduate Awards and additional 4 graduate students received the CCBS Summer Graduate Scholarships.
We were thrilled to receive a strong pool of proposals for this cycle and extend our sincere thanks to all applicants for their thoughtful submissions. Congratulations to this year’s awardees—we look forward to seeing the impact of your work in the months ahead.
CCBS Summer Graduate Awards:
Kian Fallah
Major: Speech and Hearing Science; Expected Graduation: Spring 2029; Project: Estimating the Noise Susceptibility of Speech Using Deep Learning
Tianyu Zhang
Major: Psychology; Expected Graduation: Summer 2026; Project: Revealing subtle individual differences in search strategies through gaze patterns and Reinforcement Learning agents
Sara Court
Major: Computational Linguistics, Responsible AI, Expected Graduation: Fall 2026; Project: Responsible Applications of LLMs for Low-Resource Machine Translation
Sophia Nichols
Major: Speech and Hearing Science; Expected Graduation: Fall 2027; Project: Cognitive and Language Mechanisms Underlying Preschool Expulsion and Suspension Risk
Yilin Fu
Major: Mechanical Engineering; Expected Graduation: Summer 2027; Project: Dissociating cognitive and vestibular contributions to falls in older adults
Yi Chien Lin
Major: Linguistics; Expected Graduation: Spring 2029; Project: How Well are Reservoir Computers at Next-token Prediction task?
CCBS Summer Graduate Scholarships:
Gukyeong Eom
Major: Educational Psychology; Expected Graduation: Spring 2029; Project: Human and LLM Reasoning in Dialogic Storytelling: Interpreting Multidimensional Empathy in Classroom Discourse
Jessica Timog
Major: Speech and Hearing Science; Expected Graduation: Spring 2028; Project: Understanding Cognitive Factors Influencing Aspirations for Functional Independence, Higher Education, and Vocational Outcomes in Youth ABI Recovery
Tomiris Kaumenova
Major: Linguistics; Expected Graduation: Spring 2029; Project: Self-training Small Language Models in Dialogue Evaluation: Persona Adherence & Factual Reasoning
Natalia Moreno Buitrago
Major: Music Education; Expected Graduation: Fall 2026; Project: Desde el principio: Engaging Parents in Their Children's Learning