Rachit Dubey is a grand prize winner of the 2025/26 NOMIS & Science Young Explorer Award. He is assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Dubey received an undergraduate degree from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, an MS in education from the University of California, Berkeley, US, and a PhD in computer science from Princeton University, US. After completing his postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he started his laboratory in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2025. His research examines the cognitive underpinnings of how our minds adapt to change, and how we become disengaged from crises such as climate change.
Dubey’s award-winning NOMIS & Science essay is “The normalization of (almost) everything: Our minds can get used to anything, and even crises start feeling normal.”
Abstract
Society’s failure to act on crises such as climate change reflects a deeper cognitive misalignment in how our minds perceive change over time. Understanding this failure requires perspectives from psychology, machine learning, neuroscience, and public policy. My research addresses this gap by combining these fields. In one study, we examined the “boiling frog effect” and found that people perceive climate change as more impactful when shown binary data rather than continuous data, because binary data creates an illusion of sudden change. In another study, we examined hedonic adaptation and showed that the drive to always want “more” is computationally optimal, even at emotional cost. Together, this research shows how our minds can normalize existential risks and suggest strategies to counteract disengagement.
Portrait by Love + Wolves Co