About
About
I’m Joe Stafura, a cognitive psychologist and independent researcher. Open Loop Lab is where I bring together the main strands of my work: cognition, language, measurement, applied data systems, and human-AI research practice.
My academic training is in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. I earned my PhD at the University of Pittsburgh, where I worked with Charles Perfetti on reading comprehension and word-by-word language processing. I also gained early experience with Ecological Momentary Assessment in Saul Shiffman’s lab, which shaped how I think about measurement outside the artificial boundaries of the lab.
After graduate school, I co-founded a small digital platform company that used SMS-based assessment to measure and improve team performance. That work was applied cognitive science in a practical setting. It taught me a useful lesson: research ideas become sharper when they have to survive contact with real users, real constraints, and real decisions.
Open Loop Lab grew out of that trajectory. It began as JAB Lab, a self-funded research space with a deliberately informal name. The work became more serious and more coherent than the name suggested, so the lab needed a clearer public identity.
The name Open Loop Lab reflects three related ideas: scientific inquiry as an iterative loop, human-AI collaboration as an active feedback loop, and the deeper cognitive puzzle of how minds revise themselves through reflection and interaction.
The lab’s current work spans interpersonal violence, AI-generated citation error, and evaluation methodology. These projects are connected by a common concern: how knowledge is built, where it fails, and how better systems of evidence can be designed.