Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute

Welcome Dr. Manasvi Lingam to the DISI 2026 faculty!

Dr. Lingam is a Professor in the Department of Aerospace, Physics and Space Sciences at Florida Tech.

His research sits at the intersection of astrobiology, planetary habitability, biophysics, and space exploration. As a theorist, he uses modeling, calculations, and simulations to study living systems, the origin of life, planetary environments, biosignatures and technosignatures, and mission designs for searching for life in the solar system and beyond.

He is the co-author of Life in the Cosmos: From Biosignatures to Technosignatures and From Stars to Life: A Quantitative Approach to Astrobiology.

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Welcome Dr. Dmitri Tymoczko to the DISI 2026 faculty!

Dr. Tymoczko is Professor of Music at Princeton University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is a composer, music theorist, improviser, and programmer whose work asks how music works across sound, structure, and perception.

His research has helped reshape the study of harmony by using geometry and computation to analyze musical space. Looking forward to DISI 2026!!🧠🧠🧠

We’re excited to welcome Dr. Rachna Reddy to the DISI 2026 faculty!

Dr. Reddy is a Professor of Anthropology and Environment, Society & Sustainability at the University of Utah. She is also a Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Her research studies chimpanzees and bonobos to better understand the evolutionary roots of human social relationships and development. She codirects the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project, a long-running study of the largest known group of wild chimpanzees in the world.

At Radcliffe, Dr. Reddy is examining adolescence as a period of intense emotional possibility and vulnerability. Drawing on years of data from juvenile, adolescent, and adult chimpanzees, her work asks what great ape adolescence can reveal about development, social experience, and emotional life.

DISI starts in less than a week! See you soon!

We’re excited to welcome Richard Southwell to the DISI 2026 faculty!

Richard works across mathematics, category theory, networks, topology, programming, geometry, complexity theory, and mathematical puzzles.

He is especially drawn to the way simple systems can produce intricate forms, patterns, and networks, including through cellular automata and network rewriting. His work also asks how abstract mathematical ideas can become more visual and easier to grasp, using approaches such as string diagrams, homotopy, manifold diagrams, and box arithmetic.

See you in just a few weeks!

Welcome Dr. Stephen Vaisey to the DISI 2026 faculty!

Dr. Vaisey is Professor of Sociology and Political Science at Duke University, where he directs the Worldview Lab. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Sociological Science.

His work examines how people form moral and political worldviews, how those beliefs shift over time, and how they shape social life.

Going to be an amazing summer!

Welcome Dr. Meghan Barrett to the DISI 2026 faculty!

Dr. Barrett is a Professor of Biology at Indiana University Indianapolis, where she leads the Barrett Lab. Her research breaks new ground in insect neurobiology and welfare, using an interdisciplinary lens to address big questions in insect biology.

Her lab focuses on insect welfare, sensory systems, and thermal physiology. This includes work on the welfare concerns insects face wherever they are used or managed, how insects’ sensory systems evolve or change in response to their environments and behaviors, and how insects adapt to extreme heat and solar radiation.

Looking forward to having her there!🦗

Congratulations to DISI alum .dror on her recent publication in , “Dogs with a large vocabulary of object labels learn new labels by overhearing like 1.5-year-old infants.”

The paper investigates whether Gifted Word Learner dogs, a rare group of dogs with extensive vocabularies of object labels, can acquire new labels by overhearing interactions between their owners and another person. The study found that these dogs learned new toy names both when directly addressed and when passively observing a third-party interaction, in a way functionally similar to word learning in 18-month-old infants!

The work offers new insight into the social-cognitive mechanisms that support language-related learning across species, while emphasizing that these abilities are specific to Gifted Word Learner dogs and should not be generalized to all dogs.

Shany shared that the project was inspired in part by conversations during her time at DISI.

Read the paper here: https://lnkd.in/eswzX8yN

Photo: Shany with her dog Mitos, taken by Oszkar Daniel Gati🐾🐾🐾

Erica Cartmill, Co-Director of the Center for Possible Minds and DISI, recently spoke at EVOLANG XVI in Plovdiv, Bulgaria! 🇧🇬

Erica is co-chair of the Evolution of Language conference series, an interdisciplinary community of scholars exploring the origins and evolution of language.

EVOLANG brings together researchers across cognitive science, linguistics, anthropology, biology, psychology, primatology, computational modeling, philosophy, and more.

A perfect setting for conversations at the heart of DISI and The Center: communication, cognition, and the many forms intelligence can take!

We’re excited to welcome Dr. Shari Liu to the DISI 2026 faculty!

Dr. Liu studies the origins of knowledge through developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience.
Her lab’s current research focuses on how we explain and predict other people’s behavior, how different domains of cognition interact, and what drives visual attention in infants.

At DISI 2026, Dr. Liu will bring a developmental perspective on intelligence, exploring how minds begin to understand people, behavior, and the world around them!

We’re excited to welcome Dr. Sonam Kachru to the DISI 2026 faculty!!

Dr. Kachru is a Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University, specializing in the history of premodern South Asian philosophy and literature, with an emphasis on Buddhist philosophy.

His first book, Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism, explores how the Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu used dreams and non-human forms of life to rethink the relationship between mind and world. He is now completing a book on what the history of Buddhist philosophy can teach us about artificial minds, including our own.

At DISI 2026, Dr. Kachru will bring a deep perspective on mind, literature, nonhuman life, and the wider histories that shape how we understand intelligence!