Ari Khoudary

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ari.khoudary (at) uci.edu

Hello! Thanks for stopping by.

My name is Ari Khoudary and I use they/them/theirs pronouns. I’m a PhD student in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, where I am also affiliated with the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory (CNLM) and the Center for Theoretical and Behavioral Sciences (CTBS). I am co-advised by Aaron Bornstein and Megan Peters, and my research is supported by a Howard Schneiderman-NIMH T32 fellowship through the CNLM.

My research aims to understand how humans use past experiences to behave more adaptively in the present. This means I spend a lot of time thinking about interactions between memory and perception, formal models of decision making, and how metacognition factors into memory-guided decision making. I use a combination of computational modeling, human behavioral experiments, and neuroimaging to approach these questions from a holistic, theory-driven perspective.

Before starting grad school, I got a B.S. in Psychology (honors) with a second major in Philosophy from Boston College in 2019. I wrote a double-credit senior thesis (advised in Psychology by Maureen Ritchey and in Philosophy by Richard Atkins) on the epistemic reliability of episodic memory, using an original experiment on source monitoring as a case study. Then, I worked as a lab manager and research assistant in Felipe De Brigard’s Imagination and Modal Cognition Lab at Duke University, where I did some neuroimaging and experimental philosophy research in addition to helping Felipe and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong coordinate the Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy (SSNAP).

On a personal note, I am a queer, trans, neurodivergent, Syrian-American who cares deeply about the emotional and interpersonal dimensions of scientific research. I share my thoughts in this domain on my blog. I have long-standing interests in music, philosophy, food, and interdisciplinary endeavors. I also have a cat who I love very much. In my free time, I enjoy hanging out with friends, appreciating nature, and daydreaming about (nearby) possible worlds.




news

Jun 24, 2024 I”m super excited to welcome Nadeja Jackson to the CCN Lab at UCI! Nadeja is joining us through the Irvine Summer Institute in Neuroscience Program and will be co-mentored by me and Aaron.
Sep 28, 2023 I passed my masters exam!! Extra thanks to committee member Joachim Vandekerckhove for insightful comments and a fun discussion.
Jun 15, 2023 And like that, year 2 of the PhD is in the books! I’m not sure what I did to deserve all this, but I have a laundry list of wins to share: I was awarded the Jared M. Roberts Memorial Award through the CNLM, I won the Cognitive Sciences department bake-off, I was selected as a DECADE Outstanding Student Representative, and I was chosen for the Schneiderman-NIMH T32 Fellowship through the CNLM! I feel so incredibly grateful for all of this recognition and looking forward to a nice summer of conferencing and writing my Masters exam :)