Interdisciplinary

Philosophy

I am currently a Lattimer Research Fellow for Cross-disciplinary Explorations at UC San Diego. In this role, I am studying the philosophy of dark matter, with a focus on how recent observations of small-scale cosmic structure inform discussions of dark matter underdetermination, falsifiability, and realism.

coarse-graining MICROMicroscopicstructure MESOSmall-scalestructure MACROLarge-scalestructure WIMPSterile neutrinoAxion InteractingWarmWave-like CDM limit
Large-scale structure washes out differences between dark matter models; small-scale structure partially, but not fully, probes the nature of dark matter. From my Foundations of Physics 2026 talk.

Cognition

I collaborate on and lead interdisciplinary research at the intersection of cognition, linguistics, data science, and machine learning, often with the comp-syn team. My interdisciplinary publications are listed below:

  • (6)E. O. Nadler, D. Guilbeault, S. M. Ringold, T. R. Williamson, A. Bellemare-Pepin, I. M. Comşa, K. Jerbi, S. Narayanan, and L. Aziz-Zadeh. Statistical or Embodied? Comparing Colorseeing, Colorblind, Painters, and Large Language Models in Their Processing of Color Metaphors. 2025, Cognitive Science, 49, e70083.
  • (5)D. Guilbeault, S. Delecourt, T. Hull, B. S. Desikan, M. Chu, and E. O. Nadler. Online images amplify gender bias. 2024, Nature, 626, 1049.
  • (4)E. O. Nadler, E. Darragh-Ford, B. S. Desikan, C. Conaway, M. Chu, T. Hull, and D. Guilbeault. Divergences in Color Perception between deep neural networks and humans. 2023, Cognition, 241, 105621.
  • (3)M. Chu, B. S. Desikan, E. O. Nadler, R. L. Sardo, E. Darragh-Ford, and D. Guilbeault. Signal in Noise: Exploring Meaning Encoded in Random Character Sequences with Character-Aware Language Models. 2022, Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 7120.
  • (2)D. Guilbeault, E. O. Nadler, M. Chu, R. L. Sardo, A. A. Kar, and B. S. Desikan. Color associations in abstract semantic domains. 2020, Cognition, 201, 104306.
  • (1)B. S. Desikan, T. Hull, E. O. Nadler, D. Guilbeault, A. A. Kar, M. Chu, and R. L. Sardo. comp-syn: Perceptually Grounded Word Embeddings with Color. 2020, Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, 1744.

Art

I am involved in several artistic pursuits related to my research, often with comp-syn. Examples include:

144 Red Words: a grid of colorgrams 144 Poems by Emily Dickinson 144 Poems by Shakespeare Changing Views in Data Science over Fifty Years

144 Red Words, iSCC Color Impact 2023. Professional honorable mention; proceeds donated to Create Now.

144 Poems by Emily Dickinson and 144 Poems by Shakespeare, CharityBuzz. Proceeds donated to the Black Artists + Designers Guild.

Changing Views in Data Science over Fifty Years, Stanford Art of Science 2020. 2nd place prize; proceeds donated to Black Futures Lab.

Selected media

  • Cogsci Unpacked7/7/2025Color Metaphors, Language Models, and Embodied Minds
  • UC Berkeley Haas News2/14/2024Online images may be turning back the clock on gender bias, research finds