Deena Skolnick Weisberg

email: deena.weisberg@temple.edu
website: astro.temple.edu/~tue50577/

Bio: Deena is a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University, supervised by Dr. Paul Bloom, and trained as a postdoctoral researcher at Rutgers University, supervised by Dr. Alan Leslie. Deena's primary research interest is the development of imaginative cognition. Her research asks how young children are able to engage with representations of pretend and fictional situations and what role this cognitive ability serves in development. Her past work has found that even very young children have adult-like intuitions about the nature of imagined representations, and her current projects aim to harness these intuitions to help children learn language and uncover the structure of the real world. Deena additionally studies children's moral development and children's and adults' understanding of scientific explanations and the nature of science.

She is currently receiving funding from the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC) to help channel these interests into active efforts to improve public understanding of science, particularly through the Ultimate Block Party and L_RN, a new web portal aimed at communicating research findings to the general public