Katherine Heller

Katherine is an Assistant Professor at Duke University, in the Department of Statistical Science and at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. Prior to joining Duke she was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, in the Computational Cognitive Science group at MIT, and an EPSRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her Ph.D. is from the Gatsby Unit, where her advisor was Zoubin Ghahramani.

Katherine's research interests lie in the fields of machine learning and Bayesian statistics. Specifically, she develops new methods and models to discover latent structure in data, including cluster structure, using Bayesian nonparametrics, hierarchical Bayes, techniques for Bayesian model comparison, and other Bayesian statistical methods.

She applies these methods to problems in the brain and cognitive sciences, where she strives to model human behavior, including human categorization and human social interactions.