Cohort 4’s Eoin Cremen has had a busy June with presentations at two conferences in Ireland and a 10-day summer school in Berlin. He writes:
“Both NeuroPsychEconomics and SARMAC were international conferences but held in locations near Dublin and one week apart. This was not only helpful logistically for me but also promised to give me the chance to interact with both home and abroad academics. The Association for NeuroPsychEconomics focuses on the intersection between neuroscience, psychology, and economics. This year’s theme was titled ‘Purposeful Choices: Leverage Interdisciplinary Research for Businesses and for Collective Good’. SARMAC is the society for applied research in memory and cognition, and it was their biennial meeting. At NeuroPsychEconomics I presented a poster that summarised my first two experiments. At SARMAC I presented these in further detail at the ‘Cognition and Online Information’ session.
The Max-Planck’s Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality was the highlight of my PhD experience to date. Janina, my supervisor, had flagged this as a target for me two years ago (the institute is currently only running biennially) and I am very thankful that she did. Gerd Gigerenzer is the figurehead of the summer school, and Ralph Hertwig is the co-lead. We had nine full days of talks, workshops, and projects. This amounted to approximately 18 speakers and 21 sessions. I was blown away by the density of the academic quality we were exposed to. Each of the speakers would have been a keynote at any conference. The other 30 students in attendance were also some of the smartest and intellectually curious I have come across. To compliment this, the atmosphere at the MPI was very welcoming and relaxed, while also encouraging enquiry and debate. All this together made for an incredibly engaging and rewarding summer school. For my part, I presented a poster, engaged with discussions in close to every session, and was part of a student team presenting on interventions against online misinformation.
I have come back from these trips highly motivated to progress with my work. After a brief (and quite necessary) break, I will be working on writing manuscripts for submission, completing the analysis of my third experiment, and presenting a symposium at SPUDM 2025 in Lucca, Italy. A focus group study and development of a proof of concept AI decision-support tool are also in the pipeline. In November I will then be travelling to the US to visit a research lab that is based between Long Beach and Georgia. That trip will conclude also with presentations at two twinned conferences in Denver.”
