International Fellows

Our group interacts with and hosts regular international philosophers and empirical researchers from the cognitive sciences. Apart from Fellows associated with the Center for Mind and Cognition @RUB, we were also successful in applying for fellowships from the RUB Research School as Visiting International Professors.

Nico Orlandi (since 2022)

Professor of Philosophy at University of California at Santa Cruz and Visiting International Professor @RUB.
Website: https://norlandi.sites.ucsc.edu/


Robert D. Rupert (since 2018)

Professor of Philosophy at University of Colorado, Boulder and Visiting International Professor @RUB.
Website: https://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/people/faculty/robert-rupert


Louise Barrett (since 2020)

Professor of Psychology at University of Lethbridge, Canada and Visiting International Professor @RUB.
Website: https://uniweb.uleth.ca/members/478


Qiuran Wang (February 2024-January 2025)

Qiuran Wang is visiting on a fellowship from the interdisciplinary RUB ReThink Network, comprising philosophers and scientists from psychology and neuroinformatics. During her PhD in Padova (Italy), she has conducted experiments on decision-making in plants and is now approaching questions about cognition not from a psychological, but also philosophical angle. 

Serge Stepanishchev (January-April 2024)

Serge is visiting with a Fedor Stepun Fellowship for researchers affected by the Russia/Ukraine war. Formerly at the University of Moscow, his work has focused on the Philosophy of the Other, especially as developed by Emmanuel Levinas.

Sam Wilkinson (May 2023)

Sam Wilkinson is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Exeter, based at Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences. His research interests are in philosophy of cognitive science, especially predictive processing, and the philosophy of mental health, with a specific focus on hallucinations, delusions, psychosis, and trauma. During his visit, he will work on two projects in the context of predictive processing, namely (1) “basic control” as the grounds of cognition and affect, and (2) “Enculturated Imagination” in the predictive mind.

Barbara Tillmann (May-June 2023)

Barbara Tillmann is a CNRS research director in the Laboratory for Research on Learning and Development (LEAD – CNRS-UMR5022) at the Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France. She previously directed the “Auditory Cognition and Psychoacoustics” team at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center. Her research in the domain of auditory cognition uses behavioural, neurophysiological, and computational methods. She is investigating how the brain acquires knowledge about complex sound structures, such as music and language, and how this knowledge shapes perception and memory, notably via expectations/predictions. During her visit, she will work on predictive processing in music, speech and other materials in both the typically developing, healthy brain as well as the pathological brain. 

J. Suilin Lavelle, Humboldt Awardee (2022-2023)

Suilin Lavelle is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, and a Humboldt Experienced Researcher at Ruhr Universität, Bochum.  Her area of expertise is social cognition, with a particular focus on mindreading.  She is currently writing a series of papers on the replication crisis in psychology, arguing that it should not be seen as a ‘crisis’ but rather as an opportunity to better understand the interplay between theory, data and observation. 


Stephen Butterfill (since 2017)

Professor of Philosophy at University of Warwick, United Kingdom and Visiting International Professor @RUB.
Website: https://uniweb.uleth.ca/members/478