Vandekerckhove named UC Irvine Chancellor’s Fellow
Vandekerckhove named UC Irvine Chancellor’s Fellow
- September 16, 2026
- Three-year term and funding recognize scholars of exceptional value to the university
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Joachim Vandekerckhove, UC Irvine cognitive sciences professor, has been awarded the title of Chancellor’s Fellow. The honor recognizes scholars of exceptional value to the university, and whose recent achievements in scholarship evidence extraordinary promise for world-class contributions to knowledge. The three-year appointment will support the mathematical psychologist’s research on the use of artificial intelligence in science as well as psychometrics, Bayesian statistics, cognitive modeling, and the science of science.
Vandekerckhove, who also holds appointments in the Department of Statistics and the Department of Logic & Philosophy of Science, has been a member of the UC Irvine faculty since 2011, following postdoctoral fellowships at the Flanders Research Foundation and University of Leuven, Belgium. He specializes in building and evaluating models of cognitive processes, incorporating computational methods into quantitative and formal approaches to individual differences in cognition and behavior. He’s authored or coauthored more than 100 academic works in premier outlets that include the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, NeuroImage, Psychological Methods, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, and Social Epistemology, among others. His research has been continuously funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Research Council, and the John Templeton Foundation.
Vandekerckhove is a leading member of the Society for Mathematical Psychology, a Fellow of the Psychonomic Society, and has served as a Senior Fellow at Air Force Materiel Command and the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s in psychology and Ph.D. in quantitative psychology and psychometrics, all from the University of Leuven.
His three-year tenure as a Chancellor’s Fellow follows the concluding terms of fellow social scientists Sara Goodman, political science professor, and Michael Lee, cognitive sciences professor, whose fellowships began in 2023. Vandekerckhove joins Jeffrey Kopstein, Chancellor’s Professor of political science, among the School of Social Sciences’ newly appointed Chancellor’s Fellows.
-photo by Luis Fonseca, UC Irvine School of Social Sciences
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