Welcome Home, Dr. Corey Bohil

This semester, the College of Arts and Sciences welcomed Dr. Corey Bohil as professor of psychology. And welcomed him back home to Michigan.

“I’m a Michigander!” declared Bohil. Growing up in Elsie, a small town north of Lansing, he attended Michigan State University, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in psychology. “Then I got an opportunity to go to Arizona State University in Tempe where I earned my master’s degree in cognitive psychology. While I was working on my doctorate in cognitive psychology at the University of Texas in Austin, I met my wife, a Texan.”

Dr. Corey Bohil

Bohil has lived, worked, and taught up and down the country, as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Quantitative Psychology Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a Human Factors Researcher/Statistician at Perspective Sciences Corporation back in Austin, a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Media & Information at MSU, and a faculty member in the Human Factors and Cognitive Program in the University of Central Florida Psychology, first as an Assistant, then Associate, and Full Professor.

“We’re pretty family-oriented, which brings me back to Michigan,” he said. “I found LTU about a year ago. The difference for me is that I’ve always been at a huge research university. LTU is a smaller setting for me, but I’m excited about helping to usher in the increased focus on research. Teaching is a priority, followed by scholarship.” Bohil joined to do precisely that.

“I’m delighted to work with Kathryn Wrench, the director of Sponsored Research & Institutional Grants, to help identify grant opportunities for psychology research.”

Bohil explained that “psychology is a big field. The practitioner works directly with people in therapy and can specialize in specific disorders. Cognitive psychology is a foundational branch of psychology. It asks how the brain develops meaning, focuses attention, and makes decisions.” In other words, it “allows humans to get access to all of this knowledge.”

This subset of psychology has been around since the 1950s and is more than just theoretical. “There’s an ‘applied’ side to this course of study,” he said. Cognition is an important part of this discipline, and we can see it applied in Human/Computer Interaction and Human Factor Psychology. Bohil said, “All this controversy over AI, while exploding, even that at the end of the day, humans make the decisions.”

Bohil considers himself to be “different” in that “I have one foot in cognitive psychology and one foot in technology.” He likes to do a lot of collaborative research, which fits what the NSF (National Science Foundation) is looking for. “For example, the NSF grants a lot of money for engineering research but wants interdisciplinary teams, because the strength of the research is in how it integrates ideas from many perspectives.”

He is excited about the potential for LTU to grow applied psychology. “Dr. Nelson (College of Arts and Sciences Interim Dean Patrick Nelson) has introduced computational modeling, which creates computer simulations in certain areas like computational biology. We do the same in cognitive psychology.” The goal is that LTU students can come out with significant technological skills, living up to its motto of “Theory and Practice.”

“Maybe students can see something in the unorthodox career path I’ve taken, from the private sector to university professor and researcher,” Bohil said. “For the longest time, I didn’t know how to present or market myself. I eventually learned to stop treating cognitive science and human-computer interaction research as if they are very different. Ultimately, they are about the same things.

“That’s the good thing about academia. A university is an engine of curiosity and exploration. You don’t know where you’ll end up.” He concluded, “You can do that at Lawrence Tech.” 

It seems that Bohil and LTU agree: Be curious. Make magic.

by Renée Ahee