Celebrating the Latest HSS PhD Alumnae and the Class of 2021

Caltech honors the class of 2021 today during the 127th annual commencement ceremony. The Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences is especially pleased to present our newest PhD alumnae: Anastasia Buyalskaya (Social and Decision Neuroscience) and Xiaomin Li (Behavioral and Social Neuroscience). Please join us in congratulating them on their accomplishments and wishing the entire class of 2021 well in their future endeavors!

Anastasia Buyalskaya graduates this month after defending her thesis, Investigating Drivers of Repeated Behaviors in Field Data, with Colin Camerer as her advisor. Her research interests include consumer behavior, field experiments, experimental design, behavioral economics, and analytic methods. She follows her lab and field experiments with empirical work to analyze human behavior "in the wild." She is currently weighing offers for future employment.

After completing her dissertation, Attention, Strategy, and the Human Mind, last summer with advisor Colin Camerer, Xiaomin Li joined the Camerer Lab as a postdoctoral scholar. The 2019–2020 Lipper Graduate Fellowship recipient is interested in neuroeconomics, behavioral economics, experimental economics, saliency and attention, and behavioral game theory. One of her projects in the Camerer Lab focuses on salience and habit in consumer purchases from a vending machine on campus.

Read about these students and our departing postdoctoral fellows in the 2020–2021 Next Steps publication.