Joseph Austerweil

Senior Researcher

Joseph Austerweil is a cognitive psychologist and machine learning researcher. He investigates how people retrieve, learn, create, and teach knowledge. To do so, he examines how knowledge influences real-world situations, formalizes the ideas in computational models, and then compares the predictions of each model or theory to empirical results from psychology and neuroscience. He has multiple publications in top-tier psychology journals (such as Psychological Review and Trends in Cognitive Sciences) and machine learning conferences (such as multiple papers and a talk at Neural Information Processing Systems). Since 2013, he has been a professor at Brown University and University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he currently is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Computer Science. In June 2025, he joined the Henkaku Center as a senior researcher and Chiba Institute of Technology as a co-founding faculty member for the new School of Design and Science.