Jiya Manchanda
Kempner Post-Bac Scholar
Contact Information
Social Media
Areas I Research:
About
Jiya’s work began at Rollins College, where she studied of philosophy and formal reasoning — across mathematics, computation, and physics — and converged upon a set of questions concerning the nature of mind. These questions have since carried her across cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and technology safety, and continue to animate her efforts to bring philosophical inquiry into dialogue with computational models and empirical approaches to the study of intelligence.
Research Focus
Jiya is interested in the computational foundations of intelligent thought — the forms of internal organization that allow a cognitive system (biological or artificial) to construct, manipulate, and revise structured representations of the world it inhabits. Her research in Tomer Ullman’s Computation, Cognition, and Development Lab asks how such minds engage in inferential reasoning, represent causal structure, and undergo conceptual change. She examines mechanistic interpretability as a framework for diagnosing these internal capacities, and more broadly, seeks to understand whether a precise account of such principles might ground a scientific theory of consciousness.