I am actively seeking internship opportunities (starting now) as well as postdoctoral and industry positions (starting Summer 2026). My overarching research interest is to understand the right interface (level of abstraction) for studying intelligence. I am deeply intrigued by this question and am looking for opportunities that allow me to explore it from multiple angles.

More specifically:

1. Understanding behaviors of humans and LLMs: I aim to study how humans and large language models behave, reason, and generalize, and what this reveals about the nature of intelligence.
2. AI alignment as a communication problem: If alignment can be framed as communication, what interfaces (or channels) best support reliable information exchange between humans and AI systems? How can we design AI to improve collective human decision-making—for example, more effective peer-review systems—or to enhance education?
3. Values for aligning AI: I am interested in what constitutes “good values” for AI systems and how these values should be represented, communicated, and operationalized. (do such values exist?).

About me

I am a 4th-year Ph.D. student in Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, advised by Robert Wilson, and I collaborate closely with Marcelo Mattar at NYU. The goal of my PhD work is to understand how intelligent agents, both biological and artificial, learn efficiently to adapt to complex and dynamic environments. I aim to identify adaptive priors that guide effective learning. To tackle this question, I develop AI-based computational tools to probe these priors in humans and use insights from human cognition to understand AI. My research integrates cognitive science, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to uncover the fundamental principles of intelligence.

Prior to my PhD, I worked with Xue-Xin Wei at UT Austin, and Da-Hui Wang at Beijing Normal University. Before that, I used EEG to study working memory. Before that, I studied counseling psychology with a focus on cognitive behavioral therapy.

The pronunciation of my name is “HWAH-doang SHAWNG”.

Some of my writing

I am addicted to explore complex ideas. I write some my controversial thoughts on how we understand the world around us. See Blog Posts. I hope you find these ideas interesting! Feel free to share your thoughts or comments with me via email—I’d love to hear your perspective.

Some interesting facts:

• I enjoyed reading when I was young. My favorite writers are James Joyce, Milan Kundera, Jorge Borges, Franz Kafka , Dostoyevsky and Edgar Allan Poe.
• This stupid username was set when I was a teenager, came from Saki and Márquez.
• Yet I didn’t read much after high school. Suddenly lose my patience with long books.
• I am addicted to computer games, but only when there is an exam approaching. Since there are few exams I should take, I seldom play them now.
• I enjoy sick jokes and embarrassing short videos.
• Using a second language is painful for me, mostly because I can’t help being sarcastic but I can’t do it well in English.
• I am bad at calculating. I often mess up with single digit calculations, even with a pen and paper. This always makes me doubt myself as a researcher in computational neuroscience. (But large language models also fail to do simple calculations, I am not alone)