Judith Ellen Fan

Timeline

1. 2010–2016

   Harvard and Princeton degrees

   She earns an AB in neurobiology and statistics at Harvard College in 2010 and a PhD in psychology at Princeton University in 2016.

2. 2017

   A Glushko dissertation prize

   In 2017, she receives the Cognitive Science Society’s Robert J. Glushko Prize for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation.

3. 2019–2023

   Psychology at UC San Diego

   After postdoctoral work in Stanford’s Language and Cognition Lab, she becomes an assistant professor of psychology at UC San Diego in 2019. She holds the position through 2023. Her lab builds computational models of visual communication, including sketching and scientific visualization.

4. 2021

   The Physion benchmark

   In 2021, she coauthors “Physion: Evaluating Physical Prediction from Vision in Humans and Machines.” The benchmark compares models with human predictions about simulated physical events, including collisions, rolling and sliding.

5. 2023

   Joining Stanford psychology

   She joins Stanford’s Department of Psychology as an assistant professor in 2023.

6. 2023

   The SEVA sketch benchmark

   At NeurIPS in 2023, she coauthors SEVA, a benchmark with approximately 90,000 human-drawn sketches of 128 object concepts. The work tests how well vision algorithms recognize sketches and match people’s interpretations across different levels of drawing detail.

7. 2025

   SketchAgent at CVPR

   In 2025, she coauthors the CVPR paper “SketchAgent: Language-Driven Sequential Sketch Generation.” The system uses multimodal large language models to draw stroke by stroke and lets users create, edit and refine sketches through conversation.

8. 2026

   The Lila Gleitman Prize

   She receives the 2026 Lila R. Gleitman Prize for Early-Career Contributions to Cognitive Science from the Cognitive Science Society. Her work examines how people use drawings, sketches and other physical representations to learn, communicate and solve problems.

9. October 2026

   Evaluating chart understanding

   In October 2026, she and her coauthors update “Human-centered evaluation of data visualization understanding in vision-language models.” The study compares eight vision-language models with people across six assessments of visualization understanding, finding lower average model performance and distinct error patterns.

10. As of October 2026

    Directing the Cognitive Tools Lab

    As of October 2026, she is an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford, with courtesy appointments in Education and Computer Science. She directs the Cognitive Tools Lab, which combines cognitive science, computational neuroscience and AI to study how people use physical representations of thought.