- February 17, 2026
- By Laura Ours
A University of Maryland cognitive neuroscience researcher working to understand the mechanisms of how we learn from and about other people has been awarded a 2026 Sloan Research Fellowship, one of the most competitive and prestigious honors dedicated to early-career scientists.
Assistant Professor Caroline Charpentier of the Department of Psychology and UMD’s Brain and Behavior Institute is one of 126 early-career researchers at U.S. and Canadian educational institutions lauded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as “the next generation of leaders.” Fifty-nine Sloan fellows have received a Nobel Prize, including John Clarke, last year’s Nobel laureate in physics; more than 70 UMD faculty members have received the Sloan Fellowship.
Winners receive a two-year, $75,000 fellowship which can be used flexibly to advance their research.
“I am deeply honored and incredibly grateful to receive this award,” Charpentier said. “This recognition means a great deal to me, because it signals that the lines of research I am developing in my lab are valued not only by my department and UMD colleagues, but also by the broader scientific community. It is very meaningful to see that my work is aligned with the foundation’s mission and its belief that research in STEM fields plays a vital role in building a better world for all.”
Charpentier is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work draws from social neuroscience, behavioral economics and computational psychiatry. She leads the Social Learning and Decisions Lab at UMD, which focuses on uncovering the behavioral and neural computations involved in human social and affective influences on learning and decision-making processes.
“My lab seeks to characterize the mechanisms of social learning—how we learn from and about other people,” Charpentier said. “Along with collaborators across multiple UMD departments, we aim to expand our understanding in a way that is more ecologically and clinically meaningful.”
Charpentier and her collaborators use data-driven methods to predict mental health symptoms. Ultimately, they aim to build algorithms that capture both the richness of social interaction and the vulnerabilities that lead to psychopathology. She is currently exploring “trust learning”—a form of social learning related to how people learn to trust or distrust others, and how these processes may be disrupted.
“Caroline’s work, inside and outside of her lab, is innovative and deeply relevant to questions about human interactions, the human brain, and human behavior,” BSOS Dean Susan Rivera said. “She is an incredibly talented researcher, and this recognition from the Sloan Foundation is a testament to the boundless potential of her current and future endeavors.”
“In the longer term, I am particularly interested in developing methods that integrate large-scale, multimodal data—including behavior on cognitive tasks, naturalistic social interactions, video and conversational data, self-reported mental health symptoms, and neuroimaging—to advance computational phenotyping,” Charpentier said. “Ultimately, the aim would be to characterize stable individual profiles that can better capture the complexity and heterogeneity of human social behavior.”
Charpentier’s current and future contributions to the Department of Psychology are highly valued, said Professor and Chair Michael Dougherty.
“This award validates what those of us in the Department of Psychology already know— that Caroline is a unique talent doing thoughtful, rigorous, and cutting-edge work that will stand the test of time,” Dougherty said. “But more than that, she is an excellent mentor and role model for the many students who have had the good fortune to work with her.”