About

Hannah Merseal is a PhD candidate in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Lab in Pennsylvania State University’s Cognitive Psychology Area and Delbert F. and Marie S. Welch Fellow in the College of Liberal Arts.

 

She graduated from Wheaton College in Massachusetts in 2019 with a B.A. in Psychology and Music. She received an M.S. in Psychology from Penn State in 2021 with a thesis titled “Assessing temporal constraints on sequence ordering in music improvisation”. Hannah is the 2023 inaugural recipient of the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity's Sarah A. Burgess award, the Penn State Center for Language Science's 2022 Adele Miccio award, and the Sonophilia Foundation's 2021 recipient of the Outstanding Young Scientists in Creativity award. She serves on the graduate editorial boards of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts and Creativity Research Journal, and is the Director of Event Communications on the Organizing Committee for the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity.

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Hannah's research interests include the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying different creative domains and individual experiences, including music improvisation, STEM, multilingualism, and multiculturalism. She uses neuroimaging methods, behavioral research, large-scale data collection, and network science methods to explore the behavioral and neural correlates of verbal, musical, and real-world creativity. Hannah is also passionate about building research fairness and equity using open and reproducible methods, as well as conducting large-scale studies with diverse sampling to inform policy decisions in education and workplace settings.

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Hannah is committed to outreach between the scientific community, the public, and policymakers. She has partnered with the Imaginator Academy initiative as a research associate to measure creativity and innovative capacity at large scales relevant to organizational leadership, economists, and policymakers. She has also collaborated with the Sonophilia Foundation and ootiboo as a scientific consultant and research partner.