About

Dr. Hannah Merseal is a cognitive neuroscientist who studies creativity across contexts and diverse populations using functional neuroimaging and network science methods. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, where she works with Anjan Chatterjee.

 

Hannah earned a B.A. in Music and Psychology from Wheaton College, followed by an M.S. and Ph.D. in Psychology from The Pennsylvania State University, where she worked with Roger Beaty. Hannah was Delbert F. and Marie S. Welch Fellow in the College of Liberal Arts at Penn State, the 2023 inaugural recipient of the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity's Sarah A. Burgess award and the 2025 Dissertation Award, recipient of 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 is the current Co-Chair of the Organizing Committee of the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity and serves as Associate Editor of Creativity Research Journal.

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Her research examines the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying creativity across domains and lived experience, including music improvisation, STEM, multilingualism, and multiculturalism. Hannah integrates neuroimaging, behavioral research, large-scale data collection, and network science to understand how creativity emerges in real-world contexts. She is especially committed to open, reproducible, and equity-minded research practices, and to building diverse, ecologically valid datasets that can inform decision-making in education, healthcare, and workplace settings.

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Beyond academic research, Hannah is deeply engaged in outreach and applied collaboration. She has partnered with Imaginator Academy as a research associate to measure creativity and innovative capacity at organizationally and policy-relevant scales, and has collaborated with the Sonophilia Foundation and ootiboo as a scientific consultant and research partner. Through these efforts, she aims to bridge research, practice, and policy by translating rigorous science into insights that support thoughtful, human-centered decisions.