A Georgetown University professor received a $2.5 million grant to further neuroscience research focused on creativity from the National Science Foundation, a federal agency which supports scientific and engineering research, Nov. 22.
Adam Green, a professor in the department of psychology and the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience, is the director of the Laboratory for Relational Cognition, a Georgetown laboratory that studies the connections between ideas and creative thinking. In partnership with researchers at Pennsylvania State University, the University of San Francisco and Washington and Lee University, Green will examine the link between student creativity in all mediums and achievement while employing new metrics for measuring creativity.
Green said past research has shown the value of creativity in STEM-related fields.
“Creativity in general seems to be predictive of success, not just in the fields that people generally associate with creativity, like the more artsy humanities kinds of fields, but also in the science fields that get a bad rap for being less creative, but really involve a lot of creative thinking and problem solving,” Green told The Hoya.
The research project will measure the creativity of a set of first-year students studying STEM, as well as a set of senior students in STEM, tracking the first-years’ success throughout college and in the seniors’ post-graduate trajectories.
Mafalda Cardoso-Botelho Peña (GRD ’29), a doctoral student who works with Green in the Laboratory for Relational Cognition, said understanding creativity is crucial to expanding knowledge across fields.
“Studying creativity is vital because it taps into the processes that drive human ingenuity, uncovering how we break past conventional thinking to create ideas that redefine what’s possible,” Peña wrote to The Hoya. “In fields like STEM, this understanding doesn’t just explain past innovations — it equips us to cultivate the creative breakthroughs that will define our future.”
Green said the grant will allow his team to discern which types of creativity contribute most to success in STEM and how to use new metrics to measure creativity.
“Those include things like looking at people’s trajectory through idea space,” Green said. “So like coming up with an idea, and then another idea and another idea if you’re trying to solve a problem — what does the geometry of your journey look like?”
Kibum Moon (GRD ’27), another graduate student in the Laboratory for Relational Cognition, said that as artificial intelligence (AI) develops, creativity’s role in academic and professional settings is fundamentally changing.
“I want to better understand how AI can complement human creativity rather than diminish it and to figure out the best ways to integrate these tools in a way that allows both to thrive,” Moon wrote to The Hoya.
The research will also focus on using large language models, AI models that analyze and learn to predict patterns from language and media, to evaluate creativity in college application essays and measure the correlation between high levels of creativity and grade point averages.
Green said assessing creativity instead of using standardized tests may lead to a similar prediction of grade point average while avoiding some of the issues with standardized test scores.
“One of the things that’s been really interesting about that research is that we’re seeing a good relationship between creativity and future, at least academic success, but that metric of creativity isn’t showing nearly as much disparity by race and ethnicity as we see with a lot of the traditional admissions metrics,” Green said.
Due to environmental and socioeconomic differences between the two groups, high-income students typically perform better on standardized tests than low-income students, according to a study by a Harvard University-based research group.
Green added that universities should adopt application processes designed to assess creativity, which this research will make more accessible.
“What I would love to see is that we’re not only assessing creativity in the kinds of content that’s always been part of admissions, but we’re actually developing content for admissions that’s really well suited for creativity assessment,” Green said.
Green said Georgetown should stress creative thinking in its pedagogy and curricula due to its importance to academic success.
“We know that creativity can be taught. It’s not to say that everybody can be a creative savant, but creative thinking can be developed in anybody,” Green said. “Whatever your current level of creativity is, you can probably improve.”
