Sanjay Chandrasekharan

Professional Bio
Dr. Sanjay Chandrasekharan is a faculty member with the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India, and an adjunct faculty member with the Interdisciplinary Program in Educational Technology, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

His thesis project examined how agents restructure their environment, particularly by constructing external representations. Part of this work was done at the Adaptive Behavior and Cognition Group, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany, where he was a predoctoral fellow. He did his postdoctoral research with Dr. Nancy Nersessian at the School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, and with Dr. Tim Welsh at the Cognitive and Motor Neuroscience lab, Faculty of Kinesiology, University of Calgary, Canada.

Two application projects funded by NSF derived  from this work, in collaboration with Dr. Ali Mazalek (GeorgiaTech and Ryerson University).

His current research focus is the cognitive/neural mechanisms that support the building and use of external representations, particularly for learning, problem solving and discovery in science and engineering. On the application side, he works with digital media and educational technology groups to develop new interaction designs that help augment science learning and discovery. He has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed publications in these and related areas in Cognitive Science, and has given keynote addresses at the IEEE Technology for Education conference and the Model-Based Reasoning conference.

Current Work
Distributed and embodied cognition models of science learning and discovery. Particularly, how building and use of new computational representations lead to science learning and discovery, cognitive/neural mechanisms that support this process, design of new computational media to support science learning and discovery

Research Areas
Building and use of external representations, Distributed cognition, Embodied cognition, Common coding, Tool incorporation, New computational media

Thesis Title: Epistemic Structure: an inquiry into how agents change the world for cognitive congeniality