International Day of Women and Girls in Science

Aenne Brielmann is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. She received her BSc and MSc in Psychology from the University of Konstanz and her PhD from New York University. Her doctoral thesis focused on explaining the experience of beauty from a quantitative, experimental perspective. Her current work tackles the even deeper question of why and how people value sensory experiences. At the moment, she develops a computational model of sensory value that consolidates theories and empirical data from psychology with reward-learning algorithms from machine learning. The aim of her research is the integration of sensory value into the big picture of human behavior and cognition. She has received the Douglas H. and Katharine Fryer Thesis Award for Best Doctoral Thesis. Her work has been widely covered in the media, including newspapers like the The Daily Mail, The Smithsonian, and Die Zeit, and an invited contribution to the magazine Gehirn & Geist. When she is not busy investigating the workings of the human mind, she can be found running on trails and illustrating graphic novels.