About me

Hi! This is Gal. I’m currently based in Thimphu, Bhutan working as a Project Manager for Gelephu Mindfulness City. I am also a Visiting Researcher at the Henkaku Center at Chiba Institute of Technology.

Before this, I was a PhD student working with Prof. Rebecca Saxe in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. I worked on better understanding the computational mechanisms underlying visual attention, particularly in preverbal infants. To do this research, I used tools from developmental psychology, computational cognitive science and optimal decision theory. I also worked on automated tools for infant behavioral testing to accelerate the study of the developing mind and make it more robust.

Before my PhD, I did my MSc in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and my BSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at University College Utrecht.

After each degree program, I make a point of taking a gap year. So far, I spent this time as a visiting researcher at Hitachi R&D in Japan, volunteering at a school in the north of India and studying Vipassana meditation (as taught by S.N. Goenka). Before that, I grew up in Germany, in two beautiful unversity towns, Münster and Göttingen.

You can find my official CV here.