UCLA Professor: Dr. John Hummel

Professor John Hummel, known to his students for his enthusiasm and extensive knowledge of Cognitive Science, relishes in the stimulating academic environment here at UCLA--and it�s only by chance that he�s teaching here.

After receiving his Ph. D. from the University of Minnesota in 1990 and his Bachelor�s from the Mary Washington College in Virginia in 1986, he promised his wife one thing: he would not apply for a teaching position in two cities: New York City, and Los Angeles. But after a chance meeting with Nancy Kanwisher, then a professor at UCLA, Professor Hummel interviewed at UCLA and was so impressed by the engaging intellectual environment that shortly thereafter, Los Angeles became his new home.

Professor Hummel�s interests in the Cognitive Science field are broad. He is currently working on several projects with different professors and graduate students. Primarily, Professor Hummel specializes in the representation and processing of relational structures in perception and cognition. In other words, he�s interested in how neural architectures (such as the brain) give rise to symbolic thought-- which is quite a formidable task. But having taught himself computer programming, Professor Hummel is up to the challenge and finds the best feedback about his theoretical ideas comes from implementing them as computer simulations.

Cognitive Science was still a young field when Professor Hummel was in graduate school, and was virtually non-existent as a field during his undergraduate days. However, Professor Hummel believes he has always been a cognitive scientist at heart. Although he received his bachelor�s in Psychology, and his Ph. D. in Experimental Psychology (minoring in Cognitive Science), his dissertation was a computational model of object recognition.

Because of his numerous research projects, Professor Hummel has little recreational time outside of classes, research, and raising his two kids. The hobbies of his younger years, which include playing the violin, pottery, painting and photography have fallen by the wayside. But he probably wouldn�t have it any other way.

Professor Hummel teaches several undergraduate courses throughout the school year, as well as graduate seminars. To enroll in one of his courses is to find yourself immersed in an environment that will both challenge and motivate you. His courses are self-admittedly not easy�but then again, no class worth taking should be easy. His class difficulty is meant to push his students into using their full potential during their time in school and to expand their knowledge in ways that they might not have done otherwise. As Professor Hummel advises to undergraduates, �This is a great time in life. You are at this moment, surrounded by really smart people--fellow students, graduate students and faculty. Take full advantage of that.� Take heed of his advice, expand your horizons and raise the standards of what your education will mean to you in the end of your four years. And if you�re up for the challenge, enroll in one of his classes.

Undergraduate courses taught: Introduction to Cognitive Science, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science Laboratory, Perception & Illusion: Cognitive Science, Literature and Art, Cognitive Science Laboratory (Neural Networks), Cognitive Science Laboratory (Theory and Simulation)

Graduate seminars: Computational Vision, Neural Networks, Visuospatial Reasoning, Perceptual Learning, Visual Information Processing

Lisa Kakinami
UPJ, Editorial Board

Copyright 2002 by the Undergraduate Psychology Journal
(Vol. 1, No.1.)

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