The prestigious award recognizes early-career scientists, mathematicians, and engineers who are shaping the future of their fields
Written by Rachel Wallach / October 15
Cognitive scientist Shari Liu, assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, received a five-year Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering to support her research. The award is for $985,834, with flexible funding designed to allow promising early-career scientists and engineers to take risks and explore new frontiers in their fields.
The human brain has specialized systems for thinking about numbers, objects, space, and other people’s minds, among other functions. Liu is interested in how we combine those systems effortlessly in our everyday lives.
“Consider how you make sense of the idea, ‘Shari believes that there are two apples in the blue box and three oranges in the red box,'” she says. “How does your mind and brain compose the number, identity, and location of the objects, and assign that as the content of someone’s mental state?”
Some scientists believe that those specialized brain regions each do their own jobs, and a separate, more generalized system pulls the results together, Liu says. But Liu questions this model, hypothesizing instead that the specialized systems communicate with one another directly.
“If this hypothesis is true, then it would really change how we think about the architecture of the human mind and brain,” Liu says. The new framework could have implications for understanding conditions characterized by difficulties with a particular domain of reasoning, she adds, like autism.
Liu, who arrived at Johns Hopkins in 2023 after earning a doctorate at Harvard and completing a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT, says she’s always been interested in theory of the mind—the capacity to understand other people’s behaviors in terms of their mental states, like beliefs and desires.
In her graduate and postdoc research, she studied the developmental origins, computational basis, and neural substrates of those capacities. She noticed that to make sense of other people’s behavior, we also often have to account for their physical environment—for example, they can’t see through walls.
“I started getting really obsessed with the question of how our minds and brains piece together information from these different systems. That is the big puzzle.” she says.
While many labs study a single system of the brain at a time—for example, how the brain processes faces, objects, or places—Liu wants to understand how we construct thoughts that draw on several systems simultaneously. To do this, her lab uses brain imaging in adults, experimental studies with babies and young children, and computational models to study how the brain’s systems are organized, how they work together, and how they emerge during development.
“Funds from Packard will allow the lab to really put this research program to the test and take on riskier experiments that are hard to fund otherwise,” Liu says. “These funds will also go toward supporting the brilliant people in my lab—I’m lucky to work with them every day on these problems.”
Liu is the 21st scholar affiliated with Johns Hopkins to receive this fellowship, which was established by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in 1988 “to encourage fellows to think big and look at complex issues with a fresh perspective.” This year’s class of Packard Fellows includes 20 early-career scientists, mathematicians, and engineers.