Benjamin Dever-Mendenhall
MIT Department: Linguistics
Faculty Mentor: Prof. Athulya Aravind
Research Supervisor: Megan Gotowksi and Janek Guerrini
Undergraduate Institution: Cornell University
Hometown: Bethesda, MD
Website:
Biography
Ben Dever-Mendenhall is a rising senior at Cornell University, majoring in Psychology and Philosophy. His research interests include examining cognition across both humans and animals. Currently, he works in the Integrative Neuroethology Lab, where he studies prairie vole social interactions and mating tactics (along with the neural circuits underpinning these behaviors), and in the Experience and Cognition Lab, in which he investigates the relationship between perceptions of space and time in the human mind. During the summer of 2023, he worked at MIT’s Linguistics and Philosophy Department, applying theoretical research in formal semantics to empirical studies aimed at understanding language acquisition in children. Ben also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Logos, the Cornell Undergraduate Philosophy Journal, and has published his philosophical work in other journals, including Aporia. He intends to pursue an interdisciplinary PhD in Cognitive Science to continue exploring the mind from multiple levels of analysis.
