The Cognitive Science Society and the Glushko-Samuelson Foundation have awarded SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Marina Dubova a 2026 Glushko Dissertation Prize. The prize recognizes up to five recent Ph.D. dissertations each year for groundbreaking work in cognitive science.
Dubova completed her Ph.D. in 2024 at Indiana University, where her dissertation focused on the cognitive mechanisms of discovery. At SFI, she has built on that research, using both formal and empirical methods to test the foundations of the scientific method. Her work applies the scientific method to itself, and she hopes this might lead to a better understanding of what science is and what it could be.
The Glushko Dissertation Prize was established in 2011 and aims to encourage students to pursue interdisciplinary, boundary-expanding work in cognitive science and other fields “concerned with scientifically understanding the nature of minds and intelligent systems. Promoting a unified cognitive science is consistent with the belief that understanding how minds work will require the synthesis of many different empirical methods, formal tools, and analytic theories,” according to the Cognitive Science Society.
“I am extremely honored to receive this award! The prize has been awarded to many of my favorite scholars in the field, and joining them feels like recognition from the community I have long looked up to,” says Dubova. “I remember submitting my first paper to the Cognitive Science Society as an undergraduate in Russia and receiving devastating reviews, with one researcher saying that it was ‘not worth reviewing.’ At the time, it felt like there was no path for me to join the community of scholars doing the research I admired. Now, my research sits at the fringes of the field, so having it recognized gives me confidence that there is support for this research program moving forward.
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- Read the full announcement by the Cognitive the Science Society and the Glushko-Samuelson Foundation: https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/glushko-dissertation-prize/