Emily Finn, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth, has received the 2026 Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association of Psychological Science (APS), according to the college.
The award celebrates young scientists who have made transformative contributions to psychological science, according to APS. Finn was selected for her groundbreaking work investigating the neural underpinnings of human behavior and cognition. She will receive the award at the APS Annual Convention in Barcelona in May.
“Emily’s fascinating and creative research on individual differences has inspired researchers all around the world to think differently about how we study the mind and brain,” says associate professor Luke Chang, co-director of the Consortium for Interacting Minds. “She is one of the young rising stars in our department, and we are incredibly proud of her accomplishments and contributions to the vibrant research community in Psychological and Brain Sciences.”
Finn joins a distinguished group of Dartmouth community members who have received the award, including President Sian Leah Beilock, assistant professor Mark Thornton, associate professor Luke Chang, former faculty member Jon Freeman (now at Columbia), graduate alumni Justin Kim (now a professor at Sung Kyun Kwan University), Leah Somerville (now a professor at Harvard), and Dylan Gee ‘07 (now a professor at Yale), according to the college.
“I was surprised and honored to receive this, especially since many people who I look up to have gotten it in the past,” says Finn. “It’s also a testament to our community here in PBS, which has been a fantastic and supportive place for me to start my independent career.”
Finn studies how differences in brain activity and organization make people unique, according to Dartmouth. Using brain imaging, behavior, and computational modeling, she answers questions such as why different people interpret the same information differently and how brain connections drive these differences.
While most research on brain activity analyzes people’s brains at rest, Finn focuses on understanding how brains function when people experience stimuli such as movies, pictures, and audiobooks, according to the college. She also investigates how people’s brain activity and judgments differ when they passively watch a social interaction versus when they play an active role.
“We’re one of many labs that have found evidence that human brains are set up and specialized for detecting and classifying social information,” says Finn.
Her work has implications for understanding current societal issues like misinformation and political polarization, according to Dartmouth. The research is also relevant to mental illnesses, as people with depression often cast information in a more negative light than people without those disorders might see as neutral or positive.
“Society is so polarized these days—people can look at the same headline or news clip and form very different reactions,” says Finn. “My lab is trying to understand how and why different people can see the same information and interpret it in really different ways. We’re also interested in how people shift or update interpretations in the face of new information.”
Finn joined Dartmouth in 2020 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Mental Health and earning her PhD and Bachelor of Arts at Yale University, according to the college. Her interest in neuroscience first developed during her undergraduate years at Yale.
“I wasn’t actually much of a science person growing up. I was really into languages in high school, and I came into college thinking I would be a linguistics major, but I took a neuroscience class to fulfill a science requirement and became really interested in how our brains process language,” says Finn. “I ended up doing a functional MRI study for my undergrad senior thesis project, and that’s when I got bitten by the research bug.”
