Filipina summa cum laude at UPenn gets prestigious Glushko award

Julia Ongchoco was also a recipient of the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation Student Grant Award for her documentary film “Grid.” that explores the gap between hallucinations and reality. CONTRIBUTED

Filipina Julia Ongchoco was awarded the Robert J. Glushko Outstanding Undergraduate Award in Cognitive Science during University of Pennsylvania’s 267th commencement ceremony attended by US president Joe Biden.

Ongchoco also graduated summa cum laude in her major Cognitive Science, with a minor in Theatre Arts.

The Glushko undergraduate prizes were established by UC Berkeley professor and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Dr. Bob Glushko to encourage interdisciplinary studies of the mind and cognition in humans, animals and machines. He has now established the award at 24 universities, with 22 in the United States and one each in the U.K. and Canada.

According to the University of Pennsylvania press release, the Glushko award “is given to a student in their senior year with the best combination of academic excellence, strong potential for cognitive science, and/or demonstrated leadership in cognitive science initiatives at the University and beyond.”

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Ongchoco completed her undergraduate thesis entitled “Language Shifts the Representation of Sounds in Time: From Auditory Individuals to Auditory Ensembles” with her mentors Drs. Anna Papafragou and Tyler Knowlton, and has been invited to present her work at the annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society in Sydney, Australia this coming July.

Ongchoco was also a recipient of the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation Student Grant Award for her documentary film “Grid.” that explores the gap between hallucinations and reality in a series of experiments.

The film will be screened this August at the Visual Science of Art Conference in Cyprus. Post-graduation, Ongchoco will work at the Emmy award-winning production outfit Library Films New York office, and plans to continue pursuing the intersection of cognitive science and art as an independent researcher and filmmaker.

The University of Pennsylvania is one of eight Ivy League schools and boasts a cognitive science program widely regarded among the best in the world. With the growing prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive science has increasingly  become a popular major among students in the United States.  Aside from AI, the rapidly emerging field brings together other wide-ranging disciplines including computer science, neuroscience, psychology, linguistics and philosophy, among others.