It gives me great pleasure to introduce our new Digital Associate Editor, Dr. Anja Jamrozik, who joined our team a few weeks ago. Welcome, Anja, great to have you on the team.

For future reference, Anja’s Psychonomics bio page is here, and she will be publishing her first post as Digital Associate Editor tomorrow. It’s actually her second post overall, because before she joined our team, Anja already contributed to this blog during our recent digital event on #symbodiment with a great story about flexible Berserkers.

I think you will agree that she’s got the engaging style combined with enthusiasm for scholarship that we aim for in our Featured Content.

I asked Anja to supplement her formal bio with a few more pieces of information. I am glad I asked because her biography is quite fascinating:

• Anja was born in Poland but spent most of her life in North America.
• She completed her undergraduate degree at McGill University, using a sophisticated and innovative algorithm to determine her enrolment:
  

  “to pick an undergrad course of study, I read the course catalog starting from A to… cognitive science. As soon as I read the description (“thinking”, “human”, “learning”, “understanding”, “mind”, etc.) of cognitive science, I knew that that’s what I wanted to study.”

  Luckily (for the field), cognitive science starts with the third letter of the alphabet, which maximized our chances to win this secretary problem.

• Anja received her PhD in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University, working with Dedre Gentner and she is currently a cognitive neuroscience postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania working with Anjan Chatterjee.
• Anja’s work has focused on the role of language in cognition, and the ways that language can help us guide attention, reason about abstract situations, and encode information in memory. But from the start, she has also been interested in the potential of cognitive science to improve how we function in the world.
• Outside of research, Anja has been interested in art, architecture, and interior design—basically anything that involves arranging the way things look and feel. Later this month she will join her fiancé Ross Otto in Montreal to take up a position that combines her passion for research and design, by applying cognitive science to improve the design of buildings, spaces, and objects.

Welcome to the team, Anja.