HSS Honors Its Newest PhD Alumni and Their Achievements

As Caltech celebrates its 132nd commencement ceremony, the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences is proud to recognize another exceptional group of doctoral graduates. This year, four students will earn PhDs in Social Sciences and two in Social and Decision Neuroscience. Please join us in congratulating these newest HSS alumni for their academic achievements and wishing the best for the entire class of 2026!

Jack Adeney graduates today after defending his thesis, Experiments in Decision-Making Under Risk and Uncertainty, with Charles Sprenger as his advisor. As a graduate student in HSS, he collaborated with faculty members in the Center for Theoretical and Experimental Social Sciences (CTESS), part of The Ronald and Maxine Linde Institute of Economic and Management Sciences. He will join Chapman University's Economic Science Institute as a postdoctoral fellow.

Matthew Estes receives his master's degree and PhD today after defending his thesis, Essays on Law and Economics, with Michael Alvarez as his advisor. In 2023, Estes received funding from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation to support his research project "Roadblocks to Justice: Estimating the Effect of Travel on Evictions." He begins his new role as an assistant professor of law at the University of Toledo this fall.

As a graduate student in HSS, Aniek Fransen received the A. Michael and Ruth C. Lipper Graduate Fellowship in both 2021–2022 and 2024–2025. She graduates today after completing her dissertation, Neural Dynamics of Adaptive Value Computation in the Human Brain, with John O'Doherty as her advisor. After commencement, Fransen will join Toyota Research Institute as a computational cognitive scientist.

Mitchell Linegar's research focuses on methods to systematically counter political misinformation by estimating the dynamic interaction between political ideology and media consumption and scaling LLMs to extract information from large unstructured bodies of data. He earns his PhD after defending his thesis, On (Mis)Information, with Michael Alvarez as his advisor. He will begin his new role as a postdoctoral scholar at Washington University in St. Louis this summer.

Po Hyun Sung receives her PhD today after completing her dissertation, Essays on Stochastic Choice, with Omer Tamuz as her advisor. In 2024, she was awarded the Citadel Global Fixed Income Graduate Fellowship. She was also the recipient of the 2024–2025 third-year paper prize and the 2023–2024 John O. Ledyard Prize for Graduate Research in Social Science (both winning papers were written with social science graduate student Binyamin Wincelberg). After commencement, Sung will begin a postdoctoral appointment at Princeton University.

After defending her dissertation, Large-Scale Computational Phenotyping of Social Cognition in Autism, in November 2025 with Ralph Adolphs as her advisor, Qianying Wu remained with the Adolphs Lab as a postdoctoral scholar research associate in social and decision neuroscience. Her research aims to develop novel tasks and computational models to better understand and characterize social functioning challenges in clinical populations.

Read about these students and our departing postdoctoral scholars in the 2025–2026 Next Steps publication.