Ceci is a Senior Research Fellow in the lab. Her research interests are in social communication and its underlying neurocognitive mechanisms, with vocal communication (e.g., laughter) as the main focus.

Read more about Ceci Qing Cai@UCL.

Ceci Qing Cai (蔡晴) is a Senior Research Fellow in the Developmental Diversity Group at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (ICN). Her research centres around understanding the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms of social communication, with a particular focus on vocal communication.

During her PhD at UCL ICN, she investigated the socio-emotional essence of laughter in social communication, broadening our current understanding from non-autistic adults to autistic adults. Her PhD research was supervised by Prof. Sophie K. Scott CBE and Dr. Sarah J. White, and supported by the ORS scholarship (now UCL Research Excellence Scholarship). Her original work bridged diverse academic fields, incorporating methods from self-report questionnaires, to behavioural experiments, to neuroimaging (fMRI).

In 2021, Ceci was honoured with an International Society for Autism Research (INSAR) Student and Trainee Award. In 2023, she received a UCL Fellowship Incubation Award, enabling her to further study laughter production in face-to-face conversation from a neurodiversity perspective. In 2025, she was awarded the British Psychological Society Neil O’Connor Award. Prior to her PhD, she spent several years working in industry, as well as engaging in various volunteering activities related to developmental conditions.