Welcome!

The Niv Lab focuses on several distinct and inter-related lines of research related to understanding the computational basis of learning and decision making in the brain. We use behavior – and sometimes neural data – to constrain computational models of how experience changes future decisions and choices (i.e., learning), and we apply this understanding to understanding mental health conditions and tailoring their treatment. 


Lab News

June 2026
Hearty congratulations to Dan-Mircea Mirea for submitting his thesis, who will also be defending his thesis later this month! Woohoo!
June 2026
A very warm welcome to Nadja Markov who has joined Niv Lab as a Research Specialist! We're so excited to have you 🙂
May 2026
Congratulations to Jialing Ding who will be joining BU as a graduate student this Fall! We're so proud!
April 2026
Many congratulations to Sev Harootonian for submitting his thesis! We are very excited for Sev's thesis defense later this month!
March 2026
Hearty congratulations to Gili Karni for receiving the D. G. Marquis Behavioral Neuroscience Award from American Psychological Association (2026) for her publication titled “A rational information gathering account of infant habituation” (Karni, Mattar, Emerson & Daw, 2025)!
March 2026
We are pleased to welcome Anna Williams as a rotating student in the Niv Lab this semester!
February 2026
Congratulations to Jialing Ding for the acceptance of her protocol for a 'Randomized Trial to Predict the Efficacy of Cognitive and Behavioral Interventions for Symptoms of Depression' in Frontiers in Psychiatry!
February 2026
Congratulations to Rachel Bedder who is now a Research & Data Associate at Center for Justice Innovation! We're so proud!
January 2026
A very warm welcome Mohamed Abloul who will be joining us at Niv Lab this semester to work on his Master's thesis!
January 2026
Congratulations to Gili Karni for submitting her thesis! We are very excited for Gili for her thesis defense later this month!
September 2025
Many congratulations to Dan-Mircea Mirea who was awarded a grant from the Center for Health and Wellbeing!
September 2025
We kick off Fall semester at the Niv Lab with a warm welcome to our new postdocs, Camilla Van Geen, Ellie Holton, and Will Koller!
August 2025
Congratulations to Deepta Chandrasekhar who presented a poster at CCN 2025!
July 2025
Congratulations to our summer interns, Charlotte Bell, Luke Cho, Micaela Fernandez, and Lynne Abraham for completing their summer internships! We’re excited for what you do next!
July 2025
Congratulations to Gili Karni, whose submission “How goals affect information seeking” was selected for a talk at the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci) 2025 conference! 🎉
July 2025
The warmest welcome to our new postdoc Jungsun Yoo! So happy to have you join us!
July 2025
Congratulations to Branson Byers and Dan-Mircea Mirea who are Graduate Student Fellows in Cognitive Science this year!!
July 2025
We bid a bittersweet farewell to our postdocs — Rachel Bedder, Nadav Amir, and Isabel Berwian. The lab will truly miss you, but we are so excited to see all that you accomplish next. Wishing you the best of luck!
June 2025
Congratulations to Branson Byers, Jamie Chiu, Dan-Mircea Mirea, and Yael Niv, for their poster presentations at RLDM 2025! RLDM also brought together past, present, and future members of the Niv Lab, who reconnected over a lovely dinner. Sweet!
June 2025
Gili Karni is off to an exciting summer internship in Machine Learning Research at Netflix! Congratulations, we can't wait to hear all about it.