We are delighted to share that two members of the LEVYNA team have recently received major awards recognizing their outstanding research.
At this year's Dies Academicus ceremony, Jana Nenadalová was awarded the Rector's Award of Masaryk University, one of the university's highest distinctions for exceptional academic achievement.
Jana received the award for her dissertation On the Role of Sensory Deprivation, Social Seclusion, and Authority in the Formation of Religious Experience. Her research explores how religious and spiritual experiences emerge through the interaction of cognitive processes, cultural learning, and social influence. Drawing on fieldwork among practitioners of "dark therapy" and theoretical perspectives from the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion, the dissertation sheds new light on how sensory deprivation, isolation, and authority figures can shape extraordinary human experiences.
Feryl Badiani has been awarded the 2026 Richerson Award by the Cultural Evolution Society. Named after pioneering cultural evolution researcher Peter Richerson, the award recognizes the most outstanding recent doctoral dissertation in the field of cultural evolution.
Feryl received the award for her dissertation The Puzzle of Hinduism: Understanding How Hinduism Boosts the Evolutionary Fitness of Different Linguistic Communities in India. Her work examines the relationship between religion, cultural diversity, and social adaptation, investigating how Hindu traditions contribute to the success and persistence of different linguistic communities across India. By combining insights from cultural evolution, anthropology, and the study of religion, the dissertation offers a novel perspective on one of the world's largest and most diverse religious traditions.
We are incredibly proud of both Jana and Feryl and congratulate them on this well-deserved recognition.
In a new paper published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Martin Lang, Khatereh Borhani, Alexandra Ružičková, Eva Kundtová Klocová, and Radim Chvaja propose that ritual performance and persistence can be understood through reinforcement learning.
In a new study led by Radim Chvaja in cooperation with LEVYNA's Martin Lang, we examined how the Russian invasion of Ukraine affected religiosity in neighbouring European societies.
