Jonathan Z. Ong

Jonathan is a PhD student at the Princeton Baby Lab, advised by Professor Casey Lew-Williams. He is interested in how infants learn within their everyday environments and, more broadly, what early learning can reveal about human intelligence. To address these questions, he hopes to combine naturalistic and experimental approaches and use artificial intelligence as a testbed for understanding how cognition emerges from everyday experience.

Jonathan was born and raised in Malaysia, where he developed an interest in social interaction research as an undergraduate at Monash University Malaysia. He later completed an M.A. in Psychology at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore under the supervision of Professor Victoria Leong.

During his master’s, he investigated the neural basis of parent-offspring social learning using a mouse model. He also worked with mothers and infants using multimodal measures of brain, body, and behavior, and contributed to the development of AI-assisted methods for characterizing parent-infant interactions and predicting early neurodevelopmental profiles.

Simulated EEG Signals Over a 1-Second Window