Iván Dragomirov Padezhki, a doctoral student at the University of Granada originally from the University of Padua (Italy), has been awarded a prestigious doctoral fellowship from the "la Caixa" Foundation. This fellowship will allow him to join the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Research Center (CIMCYC) to conduct his research in the field of experimental psychology. He secured the funding through the 2025 INPhINIT Doctoral Programme in Psychology, which is designed for early-career researchers starting their scientific trajectories. The fellowship lasts up to four years and provides financial support covering labor costs, research expenses, and tuition fees, in addition to a face-to-face training program in transferable skills.
His doctoral studies will explore how to integrate paradigms from Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience into research on Artificial Intelligence (AI) interpretability. His goal is to provide a solid foundation for comparing information-processing mechanisms in humans and AI models. The project will investigate how information representations are transformed in memory, both in the human brain and in artificial neural network models. By analyzing these transformations step-by-step, the research aims to identify parallels between both systems. This approach will allow AI models to be used as tools to investigate how human memory works, while Cognitive Neuroscience methods will help to better understand the processes occurring within AI models. The project will be developed in collaboration with researchers Javier Ortiz Tudela, Juan Linde Domingo, and Carlos González García.
Iván was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1998. After completing a degree in Psychology at the Humboldt University of Berlin, he earned a Master’s degree in Data Science from the University of Padua. During his studies, he focused on gaining additional research experience at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and finally, at the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Research Center in Granada.
The "la Caixa" Foundation’s INPhINIT doctoral fellowships are part of an international program aimed at attracting and consolidating research talent at accredited universities and centers of excellence, such as the CIMCYC, across Spain and Portugal. These grants are awarded through highly competitive calls and offer stable conditions for the development of early-stage research projects, including specific support for advanced training and the acquisition of transversal competencies.
In the most recent call, the "la Caixa" Foundation awarded a total of 60 INPhINIT doctoral fellowships for projects across various scientific disciplines, distributed among more than 70 institutions in both countries. The program is co-funded by the European Commission through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND actions, combining competitive funding, specialized supervision, and professional development opportunities in environments accredited for their research excellence.