About me
I am a tenured Senior Scientist in Computational Modeling of Behavior at the Department of Psychology, University of Zürich. I completed my PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University under Prof. Lynne Reder in 2020, and until 2023 I was a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Klaus Oberauer at the University of Zürich. My research has been awarded with the 2025 Bertelson Early Career Award from the European Society for Cognitive Psychology and the 2021 Glushko Dissertation Prize from the Cognitive Science Society. I am also a consulting editor at the Memory & Cognition.
I use computational modeling to understand the structure, organization, and function of fundamental cognitive processes, to refine the development and evaluation of psychological theories, and to improve psychological measurement.
I publish under my full name, Vencislav Popov, but Ven is easier to say and remember, and as people have noted, “Oh, Ven, like a Venn diagram!”
Research interests
My current research focus is on how to improve inference in psychological science to resolve the theory crisis. To that aim I develop mechanistic models that specify theoretical assumptions about how psychological processes produce behavior. So far I have done that mostly in my own field of human memory to understand how limited cognitive resources affect memory strength, but I am eager to extend such approaches to other non-cognitive phenomena. To strengthen the evaluation of theoretical models, I develop techniques for improving psychological measurement and new standards for model evaluation. To make measurement models accessible for everyone, I develop flexible and easy to use hierarchical Bayesian implementations in R. I am committed to open science, and I am strong advocate for Bayesian inference.
Several goals drive my research program, including:
- developing comprehensive computational models of human memory
- understanding how people control limited cognitive resources
- developing and evaluating new methods for measuring cognitive processes
- developing new methods and tools for computational modeling of behavior
- applying computational modeling in non-cognitive areas of psychology
- measuring theoretical knowledge accumulation in psychology
- addressing the theory crisis in psychology
Research program
