Miaofan Chen

Miaofan is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland, working with Dr. Natasha Cabrera. She holds B.A. degrees in Psychology and Cognitive Science from Rutgers University. Her research centers on early numerical cognition, with a particular interest in the dynamic and reciprocal interplay between children’s cognitive development and their social environments. Her work examines cognitive scaffolding in mathematical learning, gender stereotypes in numerical estimation, and how mothers’ and fathers’ contributions to the home learning environment jointly and uniquely shape children’s early math development across diverse families. She is also interested in using neuroscientific and computational approaches to probe the mechanisms underlying numerical cognition and predict individual differences in mathematical development.