Miriam E. Schwyck

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at Columbia University working with Dr. Meghan Meyer in the Columbia Social Neuroscience Lab. I attended Bethel College for undergrad, graduating with B.A.s in Psychology and Mathematical Sciences. After college, I worked as a lab manager for the Rutgers Laboratory for Developmental Language Studies with Dr. Kristen Syrett, then the Princeton Social Neuroscience Lab with Dr. Diana Tamir. I received my PhD in Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles in the Computational Social Neuroscience Lab under the mentorship of Dr. Carolyn Parkinson.

Broadly, I am interested in how social contexts shape social thought and behavior. As a social neuroscientist, I take a multi-faceted approach to my research, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure neural responses alongside classic and novel behavioral tasks. My work uses social network analysis to quantify the social context of both perceivers and targets. By analyzing individuals’ social network positions in both real-world and artificial networks, my research examines how people learn new social networks, how they incorporate this information into their neural representations of others, and how their downstream behavioral interactions are shaped by this knowledge.