Ben Cipollini

Ben Cipollini is Director of Data Science at Classy.org, where they try to understand what motivates people to make philanthropic gifts. While getting his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science at UC San Diego, Ben was interested in human behavior through another lens: how does having asymmetrically structured and functioning brains make us human? He used computational modeling of development to understand how brain asymmetries can explain why the visual system parsing a visual scene asymmetrically (with the left hemisphere more focused on details, and the right on shapes and forms). Ben also investigated, through computational modeling and cross-species data, how the two hemispheres of the brain share their differential processing to produce a single coordinated action.