Samah Abdelrahim | سماح

About Me

Hello! I'm Samah (or in Arabic, سماح), a PhD student in the Psychology Department at Stanford University. I work with Michael C. Frank in the Language and Cognition Lab.

Broadly, I’m fascinated by how children make sense of the world, especially how they acquire language. I consider myself a **developmental psychologist under construction** 😃.

When I’m not running studies with children, analyzing data, or struggling with statistical models and online experiments, I often find myself questioning the scientific endeavor itself, pondering the legitimacy of psychological findings and the nature of knowledge.

Outside of research, I enjoy listening to Arabic music, watching TV, chatting with family and friends, and exploring the rich tradition of Islamic Sufism.

Background

I was born and raised in Khartoum, Sudan; right where the River Nile comes to life. If you’re curious to know more, check out my blog post: A Flesh in Palo Alto, A Soul in Khartoum.

Before Stanford, I earned a bachelor's degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Khartoum. But over time, I found thinking about the human mind far more captivating than thinking about circuits and engines. Now, I study **little minds with big ideas and boundless curiosity** in other words, children.

انا بت مقرن النيلين :)

Want to read more? Visit my blog (Gblog is mostly in Arabic, Medium is mostly in English :D):

Medium Blog Google Blogspot

Teaching

• Teaching assistant, Introduction to Statistical Methods, Stanford University, Fall 2024
• Head teaching assistant, Introduction to Social Psychology, Stanford University, Spring 2023
• Teaching assistant, Introduction to Developmental Psychology, Stanford University, Autumn 2023
• Teaching assistant, Introduction to Statistical Methods, Stanford University, Fall 2023

Mentorship

• Graduate mentor, Winter 2024 (Sadio Mohamed Abdi, Hoang D Nguyen, Claire Lee, Nivedita Kripalani)
• Graduate mentor, Fall 2024 (Sadio Mohamed Abdi, Hoang D Nguyen)
• Graduate mentor, Bing Honors College, Stanford University, Summer 2024
• Graduate mentor, Psych Summer Internship, Stanford University, Summer 2024

Research

• Investigating heterogeneity in shape bias: a study on procedural, stimuli, and age-related variations. Samah Abdelrahim, Sadio Abdi, Meesha Ryan, Michael Frank (The 15th Annual BCCCD Conference, January 9-11 2025 - BCCCD25)
• Abdelrahim, S. O, & Frank, M. C. (2024). Limited cross-linguistic variation in the lexical statistics of nouns in early vocabulary (BUCLD 2024)
• Abdelrahim, S. O, & Frank, M. C. (2024). Examining the robustness and generalizability of the shape bias: a meta-analysis. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46. Read here
• Bisbee, N., Tang, J. E., Yu, S. J., Lyu, Z. X., Abdelrahim, S., & Gordon, P. (July 7 – 10, 2022). Relations between exact number and exact equality: Developmental and cross-cultural perspectives. [Conference Poster]. International Congress on Infant Studies (ICIS) 2022 XXIII Biennial Congress, Ottawa, Canada.
• Tang-Lonardo, J., Bisbee, N., Jain, M., Kirby, E., Kim, S. B., Abdelrahim, S., Gerami, S., Sezcon-Cepeda, D., Coffel, M., & Gordon, P. (May 26 - 29, 2022). The Neural Mechanisms of Parallel Individuation and Numerical Approximation. [Conference Poster] Association for Psychological Science (APS) 2022 Annual Convention, Chicago, IL, USA.
• Tang, J. E., Bisbee, N., Jain, M., Kirby, E., Kim, S. B., Gerami, S., Sezcon-Cepeda, D., Gilchrist, K., Abdelrahim, S., Coffel, M., & Gordon, P. (July 27 - 30, 2022). The Neurobehavioral Basis of Parallel Individuation and Numerical Approximation. [Conference Poster]. Cognitive Science Society 2022, 44th Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada.

CV

You can download my CV here.