Congratulations to Assistant Professors Jaime Castrellon and Yi Feng for being selected as 2026-27 UCLA Society of Hellman Fellows. The program provides support and encouragement for the research of promising Assistant Professors who show capacity for great distinction in their research.
Jaime’s proposal is titled “Whose Side Are You On? Decoding Who Jurors Think About from Brain Activity.” Jaime’s lab will use the award for a new project on the neural basis of bias in legal decision making. The study tests whether directing mock jurors to think about victims versus defendants shifts their punishment judgments, and whether we can decode which party someone is mentally representing from patterns of brain activity alone. The study has implications reaching beyond the courtroom to negotiation, mediation, and political conflict.
Yi’s proposal is titled “A Novel Statistical Framework for Causal Identification and Estimation of Interference Effects.” Yi observes that in school settings, because students interact with one another on a daily basis, a single student’s exposure to an intervention or participation in a program can influence the outcomes of peers who were not directly treated. Despite the prevalence of such intervention ‘spillover’ effects, most educational and clinical studies have overlooked it when drawing causal inferences, leading to biased estimates of intervention effects. Yi’s project aims to develop a novel statistical framework and an accompanying analytical tool for identifying and estimating causal peer effects in the context of individual-level interventions.
Category: Faculty