2027 Symposium

Roger Beaty is an associate professor of psychology and director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Lab at Penn State University. He received his PhD in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and completed postdoctoral training in cognitive neuroscience at Harvard University. His lab's work spans the psychology and neuroscience of creative thinking, computational creativity assessment, and human-AI collaborative creativity. He received the Berlyne Award for early career contributions to creativity research from Division 10 of the American Psychological Association. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Institute, and Amazon. He is an Associate Editor for Creativity Research Journal and serves as the president of the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity (SfNC).

Dr. Claire Stevenson leads the CreAI Lab at the University of Amsterdam, where she studies how intelligence and creativity develop in people and AI systems. Her research combines psychometrics, cognitive modeling, and mechanistic interpretability techniques to measure these abilities and investigate the processes behind them. By comparing developmental trajectories of children and AI models, she investigates how creative cognition emerges in minds and machines.

Tom Zahavy is a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind in London, where he co-leads the Discovery team. His research focuses on reinforcement learning (RL), spanning foundational theory on RL objectives and meta-learning to applications in automated reasoning, mathematics, and games. Tom co-developed AlphaProof, a breakthrough RL system that achieved silver-medal performance on International Mathematical Olympiad problems. His work also explores the intersection of AI and human-like creativity, including generating novel chess compositions, analyzing diverse superhuman playing styles, and combining RL with Gemini to design physical origami. Tom completed his PhD in deep reinforcement learning at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.