ECOM Manager

Utku Sonsayar
Graduate Student, Philosophy, University of Connecticut

Utku's lies within the intersection of philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and cognitive science. I am interested in the following topics i) acquisition of speech acts and other pragmatic phenomena, ii) structural approaches to consciousness and iii) the relationship between number acquisition and acquisition of quantifiers. Moreover, I am particularly interested in how empirical findings can vindicate philosophical theories within philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.

Martin Flament Fultot
PhD candidate in philosophy at the Sorbonne University in Paris and PhD candidate at the Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action at UConn

Martin's interests are in the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of mind and psychology. His main interests are the problem of intentionality and the coordination of action. His current empirical research looks into the problem of postural coordination and how synergies can be measured and analyzed. His theoretical research looks into the links between thermodynamic principles, coordination and intentionality at all scales of living systems.

Michael Hegarty
Graduate Student, Philosophy, University of Connecticut

Michael's research is primarily in Philosophy of Mind. He works on intentionality, mental representation, perception, animal minds, and self-consciousness. Michael's PhD project applies recent work on nonconceptual self-consciousness to the problem of understanding the emergence of human rationality from its animal precursors. The project takes an interdisciplinary approach by incorporating work from cognitive science, psychology and evolutionary biology.

Robin Jenkins
PhD Candidate, Linguistics, University of Connecticut

Robin's areas of research interests include natural language semantics and pragmatics. His research includes the semantics of modals and attitude verbs.

Özcan Karabağ
PhD Candidate, Philosophy, University of Connecticut

Özcan's research interests include logic, philosophy of logic, and philosophy of mathematics, but he also works on problems in the philosophy of language. His research in logic focuses on the various conceptions of logical consequence, both model-theoretic and proof-theoretic. His research in the philosophy of mathematics focuses on the notion of potential infinity in theories of arithmetic and set theory.

Nathan Lautz  
Graduate Student, Psychology, University of Connecticut

Nathan’s interests and research have to do with the nature of the conceptual system.  How is meaning, at the conceptual level, represented in the mind?  How do we come to categorize our experiences?  To what extent are the properties of the human conceptual system shared across species, and how do these differences and commonalities affect communication? Influenced by a form of grounded/embodied cognition, which asserts that concepts are instantiated, at least partly, in sensorimotor and affective systems, Nathan uses behavioral and cognitive neuroscientific methods to investigate some of these questions.  He also has interest in the philosophy of mind (e.g., the nature of mental representation and the problem of naturalizing intentionality) and the philosophy of science/metaphysics (e.g., mechanistic accounts of explanation and the nature of causation in complex systems).

Joel Lorenzatti  
Graduate Student, Philosophy, University of Connecticut

Joel studied philosophy at the National University of Rosario and the University of Buenos Aires. Upon graduation, he worked both as a lecturer in the areas of history and philosophy of science and as a grantee at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Argentina. In 2018 Joel was awarded the Fulbright Scholarship for pursuing graduate studies in the United States. He currently resides in Storrs, Connecticut, where he is a graduate student and graduate teaching assistant at the University of Connecticut. His interests include history and philosophy of science, philosophy of biology, and philosophy of cognitive science.

Susanna Melkonian-Altshuler
Visiting Graduate Student, Philosophy, University of Connecticut

Susanna's primary research areas are philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of art. She is interested in the relationship between emotion, intentionality, and phenomenology. She is also interested in the relationship between emotion, empathy, and morality. She has also worked on the relationship between embodied cognition, artifact concepts, and lexical meaning. She has done so at Heinrich-Heine-University Dusseldorf where she was a DFG-Junior Research Fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre 991: "The Structures of Representations in Language, Cognition, and Science".

Amit Pinsker  
Graduate Student, Philosophy, University of Connecticut

I received my BA in philosophy and the Amirim humanities honors program from the Hebrew University, and studied towards an MA in philosophy there prior to arriving at UConn. My main areas of interest are logic, philosophy of language, and rationality.

Jason Tosta
Graduate Student, Philosophy, University of Connecticut

Jason's primary areas of research are in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. HIs current research concerns how social meaning is used to justify belief and action, and the role that imagination plays in our ability to express our experiences to other people.

Vivi Tecoulesco
Graduate Student, Developmental Psychology, University of Connecticut

My main research interests concern how individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) learn and use language, with particular emphasis on lexical acquisition and organization.  I am interested in the central auditory system’s role in language processing, specifically how inconsistent and/or imprecise neural coding of complex speech sounds affects word learning and use.  I am also interested in the lack of generalization often seen in ASD and its effect on category formation and extension as well as on word learning strategies.  Broadly speaking, I am trying to establish links between domain general sensory processing of speech and macro-level language ability.