Emily Finn, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences, has received a 2026 Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association of Psychological Science (APS).
The award celebrates young scientists who have made transformative contributions to the field of psychological science. Finn was selected in recognition of 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 to receive 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).
“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. Using a combination of brain imaging, behavior, and computational modeling, she answers questions such as: Why do different people interpret the same information differently, and how is this driven by our brain's connections?
While most work on brain activity has analyzed people’s brains at rest, Finn focuses on understanding how our brains function when we experience stimuli such as movies, pictures, and audiobooks. She's also investigating 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. It’s also relevant to mental illnesses—people with depression are often prone to cast information in a more negative light than people without those disorders might see as neutral or even 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. It was during her undergraduate years at Yale that her interest in neuroscience first took root.
“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.”
During her PhD, Finn pioneered work showing that each person has a unique “fingerprint” pattern in their brain—based on the pattern of connections between brain regions—that can be used to accurately identify individuals. This groundbreaking research has since been followed by substantial recognition, including a Cognitive Neuroscience Society Young Investigator Award in 2025, the NIMH Director's Award for Scientific Contributions in 2019, and the Association for Psychological Science Rising Star Award in 2021.
Beyond her research, Finn is committed to mentoring the next generation of neuroscientists. In addition to teaching at Dartmouth, she has helped develop a series of free online tutorials for fMRI data analysis, including dartbrains.org and naturalistic-data.org, that enable learners anywhere in the world to learn cutting-edge neuroimaging analysis techniques.