ASSC Student Committee
The ASSC Student committee is ordinarily made up of six members (three senior members and three student members) and one local student liason. The committee is largely student-run, with help and advice from the senior members. Terms on the committee are normally three years long, and are staggered so that one student and one full member join and leave each year. The changeover happens at the end of August or early September. If you are a Student Member of the ASSC and would like to join the committee please contact the ASSC’s executive director.
Student Members
Chair: Adrienne Prettyman (2009-12)
Adrienne is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Toronto. Her research is on attention and perceptual experience. She completed her B.A. (Hons) at Wellesley College in psychology, and has worked as a research assistant in clinical and personality psychology. (website)
Kingson Man (2010-13)
Kingson is a Ph.D. student in neuroscience at the University of Southern California. He thinks the hard problem of consciousness is the most mysterious and interesting thing on Earth. Under the mentorship of Prof. Antonio Damasio, he is currently using fMRI and anesthesia to probe the boundary conditions of consciousness. Why does it feel like something to be awake? Why does feeling disappear during sleep and sedation? And what happens to the brain in between? He earned a B.S. in psychology from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor. (website)
Fauve Lybaert (2011-2014)
I am a PhD-candidate in philosophy at the University of Leuven, Belgium. I am writing a dissertation on what the role of the formal self could be in the constitution of personal identity. I define the formal self as the self to which we refer (correctly), but which we do not first identify. Thus, it does not seem to be tied to any specific psychological or physical characteristics. I combine and evaluate insights from analytic philosophers (Wittgenstein, Derek Parfit, Bernard Williams, P.F. Strawson, Quassim Cassam, Garreth Evans, David Wiggins, John McDowell) and phenomenologists (Sartre, Husserl) on this matter. I also have a special interest in conclusions drawn by psychologists, cognitive scientists and neurologists in this regard. I push hypotheses which they could test and aim to develop experiments which they could execute. I for example wish to find out how self-consciousness and self-referral (two different phenomena) differ in subjects who are and subjects who are not aware of their memory loss. (website)
Local Representative: Andy Mealor (2011)
Andy is a PhD candidate at the University of Sussex investigating the differences between what the conscious and the unconscious can and cannot do with respect to learning, memory and expressing knowledge. Working with Prof. Zoltan Dienes, he investigates the phenomenological differences between consciously knowing, relying on intuition and merely guessing to guide behaviour. He is interested in the circumstances which lead to these different types of knowledge and when we should rely on them as well as the degree to which they are qualitatively distinct states. His research involves investigating the sorts of regularities that can be acquired unintentionally and the factors that affect acquisition and expression of types of knowledge. (website)
Senior Members
David Chalmers (2009-12)
Australia National University, Philosophy (website)
Hakwan Lau (2010-13)
Columbia University, Cognitive Neuroscience (website)
David Edelman (2011-14)
The Neuroscience Institute, Experimental Neurobiology (website)