Attending Faculty

Daphne Bavelier

University of Rochester

Personal page: http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/daphne/

Email: daphne@bcs.rochester.edu

Daphne Bavelier is Professor at the University of Rochester in the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. She is also associate director of the Rochester Center for Brain Imaging and director of the MindSpace Virtual Reality Laboratory. She obtained her PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. Her research focuses on brain plasticity. In particular, she asks how dependent are our perceptual, attentional and cognitive skills on our previous experience. To address this issue, she and her team examine the effect of altered experience on the organization of the brain. For example, they ask whether early deafness leads to changes in vision or whether early exposure to ASL changes the cortical organization for language. They also study how videogame playing modifies perceptual and attentional skills. They determine the nature of the changes by comparing behavioral indices of vision or language processes in populations with different experience, and assess underlying changes in neural substrates with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Luca Lorenzo Bonatti

ICREA and Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Personal page: http://psy.ck.sissa.it/perso/perso.html

Email: lucabonatti@mac.com

Luca Bonatti is ICREA Professor in Cognitive Development at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain. Dr. Bonatti has been Full Professor of Developmental Science at the University of Nantes, France, and Associate Professor at the University of Paris VIII and at Sissa/Isas, Trieste. He has also been visiting professor at the University of Budapest, Hungary, at the University of the Balearic Islands, Spain, and at New York University. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy of Mind at Rutgers, under the supervision of Jerry Fodor. Dr. Bonatti is interested in reasoning, language learning, imagination of physical events and infant cognition. His research on infant cognition has provided evidence suggesting that 12 month-old-infants have an intuitive notion of probability that applies to single, never experienced, events, and that they use it to predict what will happen next. Dr. Bonatti argues that infants' intuitive grasp of the probability of future events derives from their logical representation of future possibilities.

John T. Bruer

James S. McDonnell Foundation

Personal page: http://www.jsmf.org/about/bruer-biography.htm

Email: bruer@jsmf.org

John T. Bruer is an Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Washington University and President of the James S McDonnell Foundation in St. Louis, Missouri. Dr. Bruer is a member of the National Science Board and also serves on numerous advisory panels nationally and internationally (National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board, USA). He received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Rockefeller University. His research interests include cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, education, and history and philosophy of science. His work in neuroscience has greatly contributed to improving the education system of developing countries. Since joining the McDonnell Foundation in 1986, the foundation has initiated new programs in cognitive neuroscience, applications of cognitive science to education and rehabilitation, analysis of complex systems, and cancer biology.

Stanislas Dehaene

Collège de France / INSERM-CEA

Personal page: http://www.unicog.org/main/pages.php?page=Stanislas_Dehaene

Email: stanislas.dehaene@cea.fr

Stanislas Dehaene is a Full Professor in the newly created Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology at the Collège de France in Paris. He completed a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He heads the Cognitive NeuroImaging Unit at NeuroSpin on the Commissariat A l’Energie Atomique campus in Saclay near Paris. Stanislas Dehaene’s interests focus on the cerebral bases of specifically human cognitive functions such as language, calculation, and conscious reasoning. His team uses a variety of experimental methods, including mental chronometry in normal subjects, cognitive analyses of brain-lesioned patients, and brain-imaging studies with positron emission tomography, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and high-density recordings of event-related potentials. Formal models of minimal neuronal networks are also devised and simulated in an attempt to throw some links between molecular, physiological, imaging, and behavioral data.

Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz

INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit

Personal page: http://www.unicog.org/people/ghis/topic1/index.html

Email: ghislaine.dehaene-lambertz@cea.fr

Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz is a full-time Associate Researcher at INSERM U562, Paris, France, where she investigates the development of cognitive functions with brain imaging techniques. Originally qualified as MD, Pediatrician, she received her PhD from the EHESS, Paris, France. The goal of her research is to study the brain functional organization at the beginning of life in order to understand how complex cognitive functions, such as language, music, mathematics, etc… emerge in the human brain. Following up on François Jacob’s intuition that evolution was a tinkerer, twisting old machineries to give rise to new functions, her approach is to examine the primitive functions that are accessible to the human brain to process the external word at the beginning of life, then to study how initial biases in brain organization could be shaped by the human environment to give rise to the mature state. Her pioneering work studying language acquisition with new techniques as such high-density event-related potentials, functional resonance magnetic imaging or optical topography, has impacted the developmental neuroscience.

Judy Deloache

University of Virginia

Personal page: http://www.faculty.virginia.edu/deloache/

Email: jdeloache@virginia.edu

Judy Deloache is the William R. Kennan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. Her primary area of research is early cognitive development, especially the development of symbolic functioning. There is no domain of development more important than mastery of the various symbols and symbol systems used for communication. Her research has focused on the origins of children’s understanding of symbolic artifacts, such as pictures, models, and replica objects. She has proposed that the exploitation of symbolic objects requires dual representation: One must perceive and mentally represent both the object itself and, at the same time, one must represent the relation between the object and what it stands for. Achieving dual representation is a formidable challenge for very young children. Symbol-referent relations that seem simple and obvious to adults are neither simple nor obvious to young children, in large part because they focus too much on the object itself to the neglect of its relation to its referent. The research that she and her students and colleagues have conducted is leading to a richer picture of how very young children start the process of becoming symbol minded. It is a much more complex and difficult — and more intriguing — developmental story than most of us expected.

Luciano Fadiga

Università degli Studi di Ferrara

Personal page: http://web.unife.it/progetti/neurolab/

Email: fdl@unife.it

Luciano Fadiga is Full Professor of Human Physiology at University of Ferrara and Senior Researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology. Dr. Fadiga has a long experience in electrophysiological investigation in monkeys (single neurons recordings) and humans (transcranial magnetic stimulation, study of spinal excitability and brain imaging). Among his contributions are the description of functional properties of monkey area F5, in which, in collaboration with the researchers of University of Parma, he found a set of neurons that discharge both when the monkey makes an action and observes a similar action made by another individual. It has been suggested that these neurons unify perception and action and are responsible for action understanding (mirror neurons). He further carried out experiments in humans with transcranial magnetic stimulation demonstrating that a mirror system exists also in humans. More recently, he has demonstrated that this motor involvement is functional to perception and is investigating the role played by Broca's area in understanding the actions of others. Other fields of his research concern attention and its neuron mechanism in normal subjects and in patients. Dr. Fadiga was principal investigator in CNR projects on reaching-grasping and co-investigator in Human Frontier Science Program and McDonnel-Pew founded projects, he is actually responsible of a Unit funded by the European Commission for the study of the brain mechanisms at the basis of action understanding.

Lisa Feigenson

Johns Hopkins University

Personal page: http://www.psy.jhu.edu/~feigenson/

Email: feigenson@jhu.edu

Lisa Feigenson is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Cognitive Sciencerat the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. She received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from New York University. Dr. Feigenson’s work concentrates on mental representations and the computations that we can perform with these representations and focuses specifically on the concept “individual”. She asks questions like: Under what conditions do infants represent individual objects? How many objects can infants/adults represent at one time? What information can be linked to object representations, and what computations can be performed over these representations? Dr. Feigenson approaches these issues, which are of broad relevance to cognitive psychology, by studying infants and young children for two main reasons. First, infants’ performance can inform us about the cognitive primitives that are available throughout the lifespan, and which may be evolutionarily basic. Second, studying children enables us to observe changes in representational vocabulary. By examining key points in development we can gain insight into the role played by a set of representations as new knowledge is acquired, and as new knowledge structures are created.

Susan Fitzpatrick

James S. McDonnell Foundation

Personal page: http://www.jsmf.org/about/fitzpatrick-biography.htm

Email: susan@jsmf.org

Susan Fitzpatrick is Vice President with the James S. McDonnell Foundation and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at Washington University School of Medicine (St. Louis), teaching neuroscience. She received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Neurology from Cornell University Medical College. After 5 years pursuing in vivo NMR spectroscopic studies of brain metabolism in the Department of Molecular Biochemistry and Biophysics at Yale University, Dr. Fitzpatrick shifted her career to non-profit administration. Dr. Fitzpatrick lectures and writes on issues concerning the role of private philanthropy in the support of scientific research, and on issues related to the public understanding of science.

Albert M. Galaburda

Harvard University

Personal page: http://www.harvardscience.harvard.edu/directory/researchers/albert-m-galaburda

Email: agalabur@bidmc.harvard.edu

Albert M. Galaburda is currently the Emily Fisher-Landau Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School, and Director of the Division of Cognitive Neurology at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. His career has spanned research on the biological basis of cerebral dominance and language based learning disabilities. He currently has an NIH grant to study the effects of candidate dyslexia susceptibility genes on brain development, and he is closely involved in teaching college students about mind and the brain within the initiative set up at Harvard University by the name of Mind, Brain, and Behavior. His hope is to see some of the advances in the brain and cognitive sciences be implemented in improved educational systems for both typically developing children and children with learning disabilities.

Charles R. Gallistel

Rutgers University

Personal page: http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/faculty/GnG/gallistel.html

Email: galliste@ruccs.rutgers.edu

Charles R. Gallistel is full Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. He and Rochel Gelman co-direct the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. The long term goal of his research is to determine the cellular and molecular bases of memory. Using psychophysical methods to determine quantitative characteristics of the neural substrate for reward brain stimulation, he has been exploring behavioral methods to screen genetically manipulated mice to search for the molecular machinery of memory. Dr. Gallistel's research is focused on fully automated, highly diagnostic behavioral screens for malfunctions in the cognitive mechanisms that enable animals to locate themselves in time and space and remember simple abstract quantities like rates and proportions. Genetic approaches to the neurobiological mechanism of memory. Animal cognition: spatial, temporal and numerical learning and reasoning. He has published numerous books and reviews in the area of memory.

Isabel Gauthier

Vanderbilt University

Personal page: http://gauthier.psy.vanderbilt.edu/index.html

Email: isabel.gauthier@vanderbilt.edu

Isabel Gauthier is Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. She received her PhD in Psychology from Yale University. She studies visual object recognition, with particular emphasis on the plasticity of recognition mechanisms and their neural substrate. One issue that is of particular interest to her is how the visual system organizes itself into what appears to be category-specific modules. For instance, face recognition is often given as an example of a highly specialized module that may function independently from general object recognition mechanisms. However, faces are among the most visually similar objects that we need to recognize individually and most of us acquire a large amount of expertise in doing so throughout our lives. A diversity of techniques (e.g., expertise training with computer-generated objects, brain-lesion studies, functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments) can be used in order to explore factors that may contribute to the tuning of general mechanisms for the particular problem of face recognition. Current research continues to explore the role of expertise in object recognition, including new lines of research into perceptual expertise with letters and also haptic expertise. Other projects include looking at the role of spatial frequencies in various visual areas involved in object recognition and investigating interactions between the visual and semantic systems.

Rochel Gelman

Rutgers University

Personal page: http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~rgelman/lab/index.html

Email: rgelman@ruccs.rutgers.edu

Rochel Gelman is Director Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. Rochel's interests include developmental cognitive science; theory of concepts; domain-relevant concept learning and conceptual change; causal principles; verbal and non-verbal representations and re-representations of arithmetic; representational tools; math and science literacy. She obtained her PhD from UCLA with specializations in Developmental Psychology and Learning. Her research in developmental cognitive science works to uncover the ease with which young children acquire intuitive understandings of natural numbers and arithmetic, children's perceptions of separately moveable animate and inanimate objects, children's understanding that outcomes have causes, and how children learn words and conversationally appropriate ways of talking. Prof. Gelman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a William James Fellow of the American Psychological Society. She also serves as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMS).

Susan Goldin-Meadow

University of Chicago

Personal page: http://goldin-meadow-lab.uchicago.edu/

Email: sgm@uchicago.edu

Susan Goldin-Meadow is Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on which aspects of language development are more (or less) sensitive to linguistic and environmental input. She has been engaged in a research program to identify the properties of language whose development can withstand wide variations in learning conditions. Her current work focuses on whether deaf children, lacking conventional language models in other cultures (Nicaragua and Turkey), can develop gesture systems that are similarly structured; that is, the focus is on the resilience of various properties of language in the face of wide cultural variation. Another facet of her work explores the spontaneous gestures that hearing adults and children produce as they speak. In her current research she is exploring whether gesture does more than just reflect learning. For her, gesture has the potential to contribute to cognitive change, directly by influencing the learner and indirectly by influencing the learning environment.

Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek

Temple University

Personal page: http://astro.temple.edu/~khirshpa/flash.html

Email: khirshpa@temple.edu

Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek is the Stanley and Debra Lefkowitz Professor in the Department of Psychology at Temple University, where she serves as Director of the Infant Language Laboratory and Co-Founder of CiRCLE (The Center for Re-Imagining Children’s Learning and Education). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Hirsh-Pasek’s research in the areas of early language development, literacy and infant cognition is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and Human Development. She is deeply committed to bridging the gap between research and practice. To that end, she was a researcher on the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, co-developed the language and literacy preschool curricula for the State of California and has consulted with toy companies and media programs like Sesame Workshop.

Frank C. Keil

Yale University

Personal page: http://www.yale.edu/psychology/FacInfo/Keil.html

Email: frank.keil@yale.edu

Frank Keil is Professor of Psychology and Linguistic at the University of Yale. He received his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. His research concerns with the question of how we carve up the world into meaningful clusters and reason about those clusters. This question leads to research projects on categorization, intuitive theories, conceptual change, words and concepts, and causal understanding with a special emphasis on how patterns vary across conceptual domains. His research on intuitive theories asks about the coarseness of grain with which we track causal regularities and stable patterns. He and his team are exploring several ways in which skeletal understandings guide cognition and how they become more elaborated with development. They often deal with gaps in understanding by relying on the division of cognitive labor that occurs in all cultures. Their work shows that even preschoolers use notions of the division of cognitive labor to guide inferences about knowledge clusters. Other projects show how that early understanding develops dramatically in later years and is linked to skeletal theories of how the world is structured.

David Klahr

Carnegie-Mellon University

Personal page: http://www.psy.cmu.edu/faculty/klahr/

Email: klahr@cmu.edu

David Klahr holds the Walter van Dyke Bingham Chair of Cognitive Development and Education Sciences in the Department of Psychology at CMU. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon's Graduate School of Industrial Administration in Organizations and Social Behavior. He is currently Director of the Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER), a doctoral training grant funded by the Office of Education. Throughout his career, Klahr has focused on the analysis of complex cognitive processes in such diverse areas as voting behavior, college admissions, consumer choice, peer review, problem solving and scientific reasoning. He pioneered the application of information processing analysis to questions of cognitive development, and, in collaboration with Iain Wallace, formulated the first computer simulation models to account for children's performance on a variety of Piagetian tasks and other types of problems. Dr. Klahr's most recent research has investigated the cognitive processes that support children's understanding of the fundamental principles underlying scientific thinking. This work includes both basic research with pre-school children and more applied classroom studies of how to improve the teaching of experimental science in elementary school.

Kenneth R. Koedinger

Carnegie Mellon University

Personal page: http://pact.cs.cmu.edu/koedinger.html

Email: koedinger@cmu.edu

Kenneth R. Koedinger is Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He obtained his PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the same University. His background includes a BS in Mathematics, a MS in Computer Science, a PhD in Cognitive Psychology, and experience teaching in an urban high school. This multi-disciplinary preparation has been critical to his research goal of creating educational technologies that dramatically increase student achievement. Toward this goal, he creates "cognitive models", computer simulations of student thinking and learning, that are used to guide the design of educational materials, practices and technologies. These cognitive models provide the basis for an approach to educational technology called "Cognitive Tutors" in which he and his team create rich problem solving environments for students to work in and provide just-in-time learning assistance much like a good human tutor does. He has developed Cognitive Tutors for mathematics and science and has tested them in the laboratory and the classroom. In a whole-year classroom study with our Algebra Cognitive Tutor, he has shown that students in our experimental classrooms outperformed students in control classes by 50-100% on targeted real world problem solving skills and by 10-25% on standardized tests. His research has contributed new principles and techniques for the design of educational software and has produced basic cognitive science research results on the nature of mathematical thinking and learning. He has authored dozens peer-reviewed publications, several book chapters, and other papers and have been a Project Investigator on 16 major grants. He is a co-founder and board member of Carnegie Learning, Inc. and the CMU director of the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center (PSLC).

Kristi Lockhart

Yale University

Personal page: http://www.yale.edu/psychology/faculty.html

Email: kristi.lockhart@yale.edu

Kristi Lockhart is an associate research scientist and lecturer at Yale University. She received her graduate degrees from Stanford University and University of Pennsylvania. A licensed clinical psychologist, Dr. Lockhart specializes in working with children and families, with a specific interest in depression and other severe mental disorders. Her research focuses on children’s social-cognitive development, specifically children’s beliefs about the origins and stability of traits. More recently, she has been investigating young children’s understanding of cheating.

Bruce McCandliss

Vanderbilt University

Personal page: http://kc.vanderbilt.edu/site/people/13626/mccandliss-bruce.aspx

Email: bruce.mccandliss@vanderbilt.edu

Bruce McCandliss is Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Psychology and Human Development, at Vanderbilt University. He obtained his PhD in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Oregon. His research studies developmental cognitive neuroscience, with an emphasis on questions of how the neural substrates of several cognitive abilities change via learning and education. His laboratory employs several diverse techniques to investigate cognitive change across development and learning, including training studies in adults and children, longitudinal research in school-age children, naturalistic school-based studies, and observational and intervention studies. Changes in neural structure and function are measured primarily through functional magnetic resonance imaging, diffusion tensor imaging analysis of white matter tract structures, and high-density EEG recordings. Cognitive domains of central interest include reading/language development, numerical/mathematical cognitive development, and domain-general attention abilities.

Mark A. McDaniel

Washington University in St. Louis

Personal page: http://www.psych.wustl.edu/learning

Email: mmcdanie@artsci.wustl.edu

Mark A. McDaniel is a Professor of Psychology at Washington University. He recieved his PhD in Psychology from the University of Colorado, 1980. He conducts research on human learning and memory and particularly on prospective memory and memory and aging. One unifying theme in his research is the investigation of factors and processes that lead to memory and learning failures. McDaniel has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and edited books and is a leader in the field of prospective memory, with over two million dollars in grant support from NIH and NASA for memory and cognition research. He is a Fellow of Divisions 3 (Experimental Psychology) and 20 (Adult Development and Aging) of the American Psychological Association, a member of the Scientific and Program Committee for the Second and Third European Workshops on Imagery and Cognition, the past Associate Editor for two memory journals, including Associate Editor for five years for the flagship journal in memory, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, and currently is an Action Editor for Cognitive Psychology. He is a past President of the Rocky Mountain Psychology Association and is invited to talk on memory throughout the world, both to scientific audiences and to lay audiences of senior groups.

Jacques Mehler

Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati

Personal page: http://www.sissa.it/cns/lcd/jacques.htm

Email: mehler@sissa.it

Jacques Mehler is Director of the Language, Cognition and Development Laboratory at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, Trieste. He completed a Ph.D. in Psychology at Harvard University. His research focuses on the human development of Language and Mind and also on the cerebral bases of Language. He and his colleagues perform investigations on very young infants, bilingual children and adults. In some of their studies they use innovative brain imaging equipment, which is especially well suited for the study of very young babies. Dr. Mehler collaborates with researchers from many disciplines - pediatrics, physics, philosophy, engineering and psychology. This combined expertise makes the team better able to explore and understand, to connect models of cognitive development and neurobiology, and to contribute to pediatric science.

Roxana Moreno

University of New Mexico

Personal page: http://www.unm.edu/~moreno/

Email: moreno@unm.edu

Dr. Roxana Moreno is an Educational Psychology Professor at the University of New Mexico. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her research interests are in learning and higher-order cognition, with a special interest in applying cognitive and motivation theories to educational technology. As the Principal Investigator of two large National Science Foundation grants, she is currently developing and evaluating a virtual classroom system for teacher education and agent-based interactive environments for pre-college engineering education. Dr. Moreno serves as an Editorial Board Member for Educational Psychology Review, Educational Psychologist, and Educational Researcher; is an appointed scientist for the U.S.A. Department of Education; and has been admitted as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in the areas of Education and Instructional Media Design.

Andrea Carlo Moro

Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele

Personal page: http://www.unisr.it/persona.asp?id=2447&linguacv=english

Email: moro.andrea@unisr.it

Andrea Moro is Full Professor of General Linguistics at San Raffaele University in Milan. He completed a Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Padua and a DES at the University of Geneva. He has been visiting scientist at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT and at the Department of Linguistics at Harvard University. His main fields of research are theoretical syntax (clause structure, expletives, unaccusativity, locality and syntactic movement), the relation between syntax and semantics (predication, existential sentences, definiteness effect, quasi-copular sentences) and neurolinguistics (focussing on the relation between syntax and the brain). His current research explores the neural correlates of syntax by the use of neuroimaging techniques. His work has provided evidence for the idea that syntax is autonomous and that the human brain recognizes only those rules that are possible in human languages (that follow universal principles) while it ignores the rules that are impossible in human languages. His research therefore contributes to a better understanding of the general and specific learning mechanisms of humans. Among his publications "The boundaries of Babel. The brain and the enigma of impossible languages", MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008.

Marina Nespor

Università di Milano Bicocca

Personal page: http://www.psicologia.unimib.it/03_persone/scheda_personale.php?personId=295

Email: marina.nespor@unimib.it

Marina Nespor is Proffesor at the Università degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca, Italy. The research program of Marina Nespor concentrates on the sound system of language and how this conveys information about syntax, on the one hand, and segmentation of the speech flow, on the other hand. Within this general line of research, she has concentrated on rhythm and its relation to word order, and how rhythm may help acquire different aspects of language. She has recently also investigated the different cognitive mechanisms responsible for different orders of words in sentences.

Miguel A.L. Nicolelis

Duke University

Personal page: http://www.nicolelislab.net/

Email: nicoleli@neuro.duke.edu

Miguel Nicolelis is Anne W. Deane Professor of Neuroscience at Duke University School of Medicine and Co-director of the Center for Neuroengineering at Duke University. From 2003 to the present date he has coordinated the Edmond and Lily Safra- International Institute of Neuroscience of Natal (ELS-IINN), a Science-Education enterprise aiming at the establishment of a cutting-edge Neuroscience Institution, an Education Science Program for poor children and a Medical Center devoted to the free medical care of high-risk pregnant women from poor communities. Dr. Nicolelis received his Ph.D. in Physiology at the São Paulo University. The research presented in his thesis comprised the development of integrated computational system for the analysis of neural networks’ structural and physiological properties. In 1988 Dr. Nicolelis moved to Philadelphia to perform post-doctoral work in Neurophysiology in the laboratory of John Chapin, at Hahnemann University. Dr. Nicolelis has dedicated his carreer to the understanding of neural codes and the development of brain machines interfaces aiming at the treatment of neurological disorders and conditions such as epilepsy, Parkinson´s disease and paralysis.

Marcela Peña

P. Universidad Catolica de Chile & Universidad de Chile

Personal page: http://www.epuc.cl/ficha_profesor.php?idProfesor=27

Email: pena@sissa.it

Marcela Peña is Associated Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile and at the Universidad de Chile. Originally she is an MD, Pediatrician and obtained her PhD in Cognitive Science and Psycholinguistic from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France. Her research interest is focused to explore early cognitive development and early learning. Integrating behavioral and neuroimage techniques and methods, she and her team study how the infants and young children learn their native language and develop their mathematical cognition and their symbolic mind. In her studies she includes healthy participants and patients.

Michael Posner

University of Oregon

Personal page: http://uoneuro.uoregon.edu/ionmain/htdocs/faculty/posner.html

Email: mposner@uoregon.edu

Michael Posner is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Oregon and Adjunct Prof. of Psychology in Psychiatry at the Weill Medical College of Cornell, where he served as founding director of the Sackler Institute. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Dr.Posner developed with Marcus Raichle studies of imaging the human brain during cognitive tasks. He has also worked on the anatomy, circuitry, development and genetics of three attentional networks underlying maintaining alertness, orienting to sensory events and voluntary control of thoughts and ideas. His methods for measuring these networks have been applied to a wide range of neurological, psychiatric and developmental disorders and to normal development and school performance. His current research involves a longitudinal study of children prior to school designed to understand the interaction of specific experience and genes in shaping attention and self regulation.

Alexandre Pouget

University of Rochester

Personal page: http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/alex/

Email: alex@bcs.rochester.edu

Alexandre Pouget is Associate Professor in the Brain and Cognitive Science Department at the University of Rochester and Head of the Laboratory of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience. He completed a Ph.D. in Biology at the University of California, San Diego. The goal of his research is to uncover general principles of computation in neural circuits, and more particularly, cortical circuits. Answering this question is critical to understanding how the brain performs a wide variety of tasks, including seeing, hearing, representing the external world, making decisions or controlling motor behavior. Interestingly, the last few years have seen the emergence of a general theory of neural computation which provides a unifying framework to understand human behavior in wide variety of seemingly unrelated domains such as visual perception, cue integration, multisensory integration, decision making, language acquisition, concept acquisition and motor control. This theory is known as the theory of statistical inferences, or Bayesian inferences. The long term goal of his research and that of his colleagues at the laboratory is to understand how these Bayesian inferences are implemented in neural circuits.

Marcus E. Raichle

Washington University in St. Louis

Personal page: http://www.nil.wustl.edu/labs/raichle/

Email: marc@npg.wustl.edu

Marcus E. Raichle, a neurologist, is a Professor of Radiology, Neurology, Neurobiology and Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St Louis. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, The Institute of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He and his colleagues have made outstanding contributions to the study of human brain function through the development and use of positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Their landmark study (Nature, 1988) described the first integrated strategy for the design, execution and interpretation of functional brain images. It represented 17 years of work developing the components of this strategy (e.g., rapid, repeat measurements of blood flow with PET; stereotaxic localization; imaging averaging; and, a cognitive subtraction strategy). Another seminal study led to the discovery that blood flow and glucose utilization change more than oxygen consumption in the active brain (Science, 1988) causing tissue oxygen to vary with brain activity. This discovery provided the physiological basis for subsequent development fMRI and caused researchers to reconsider the dogma that brain uses oxidative phosphorylation exclusively to fuel its functional activities. Finally seeking to explain task-induced activity decreases in functional brain images they employed an innovative strategy to define a physiological baseline (PNAS, 2001; Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2001). This has led to the concept of a default mode of brain function and invigorated studies of intrinsic functional activity, an issue largely dormant for more than a century. An important facet of this work was the discovery of a unique fronto-parietal network in the brain that has come to be known as the default network. This network is now the focus of work on brain function in health and disease worldwide. In summary, the Raichle group has consistently led in defining the frontiers of cognitive neuroscience through the development and use of functional brain imaging techniques.

Sidarta Ribeiro

Instituto Internacional de Neurociências de Natal Edmond e Lily Safra

Personal page: http://www.natalneuro.org.br/organizacao/cientistas_iinn/index.asp

Email: ribeiro@natalneuro.org.br

Sidarta Ribeiro was born and raised in Brasília, Brazil. He majored in biology at the University of Brasília and got a master degree in neurobiology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He got a Ph.D. at the Rockefeller University in New York under the mentorship of Claudio Mello and Fernando Nottebohm. The research presented in his thesis comprised molecular studies of auditory perception in songbirds and memory consolidation during sleep in rats. Sidarta then moved to Durham to perform post-doctoral work in the laboratory of Miguel Nicolelis, at Duke University. The investigation focused on electrophysiological and molecular mechanisms underlying the cognitive role of sleep in rodents. In 2005, he moved to Natal in Brazil to launch the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute of Neuroscience of Natal (ELS-IINN). Sidarta was the scientific director of the Institute until 2008, when he became full professor of neuroscience at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, and head of laboratory at the IINN-ELS. His current research deals with sleep & memory as well as animal communication, in models as diverse as mice, rats, lizards, marmosets and humans.

Luigi Rizzi

Università di Siena

Personal page: http://www.ciscl.unisi.it/persone/rizzi.htm

Email: rizzil@unisi.it

Luigi Rizzi is Full Professor of Linguistics at the University of Siena. He studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore, at the University of Pisa and at the University of Paris VIII. He has been on the faculty of departments of linguistics at different universities in Europe and in the US; in particular, he has been associate professor at MIT, full professor at the University of Geneva, adjunct professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris. He is an honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America, and is a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics (LOT). His research fields are theoretical linguistics and the study of language acquisition and he has contributed in particular to the development of the parametric approach to comparative syntax, to the theory of locality and to the study of syntactic representations, with especial reference to the cartography of syntactic structures.

Philippe Schlenker

Institut Jean-Nicod (CNRS). Paris. France

Personal page: http://as.nyu.edu/object/aboutas.globalprofessor.PhilippeSchlenker

Philippe Schlenker is a Senior Researcher at Institut Jean-Nicod (CNRS). He was educated at École Normale Supérieure (Paris), and obtained a Ph.D. in Linguistics from MIT, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from EHESS (Paris). Previously, he taught at École Normale Supérieure, Paris, at the University of Southern California, and at the University of California - Los Angeles. Dr. Schlenker’s research interests include semantics, pragmatics, the philosophy of language and philosophical logic. In recent work, he has sought to combine empirical, philosophical and logical approaches to bring new light to the semantics of indexical expressions and indirect discourse (“A Plea for Monsters,” Linguistics and Philosophy 2003, “Context and Thought and Context of Utterance,” Mind and Language, 2004), to intensional constructions (“Ontological Symmetry in Language,” Mind and Language 2006), and to anaphora (“Non-Redundancy: A Semantic Reinterpretation of Binding Theory,” Natural Language Semantics, 2004). His current research is concerned with the boundary between semantics and pragmatics, especially with respect to presupposition, a topic which contributed in the 1980’s to a methodological shift in semantics. His ongoing work argues that new theoretical directions should be explored (“Be Articulate,” Theoretical Linguistics, 2008; “Local Contexts”, forthcoming in Semantics & Pragmatics). Dr. Schlenker also has a side-interest in semantic paradoxes (“The Elimination of Self-Reference,” Journal of Philosophical Logic 2006; “Anselm’s Argument and Berry’s Paradox,” Noûs 2009). Dr. Schlenker is the Managing Editor of the Journal of Semantics, and a member of the editorial boards of several semantics journals. His research has been funded by the Fondation Thiers, the NSF, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the European Science Foundation, which supports a 5-year project on presupposition which he leads (‘Euryi’ award, 2007).

Robert S. Siegler

Carnegie-Mellon University

Personal page: http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~siegler/

Email: rs7k@andrew.cmu.edu

Robert Siegler is Teresa Heinz Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. He has been at Carnegie Mellon since receiving his Ph.D. from SUNY at Stony Brook. His research focuses on the growth during childhood of problem solving and reasoning. Three areas of particular interest are strategy choices, long-term learning, and educational applications of cognitive-developmental theory. The research on strategy choices focuses on how children decide which strategy to use from among the many strategies they know. The research on long-term learning examines how children discover new strategies. The research has yielded a number of educational implications, particularly in the area of early mathematics. It is being used to develop tests to identify young children who are at risk for later mathematical difficulties. He has served as a member from 2006-2008 of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, a Presidential Commission appointed by the U. S. Secretary of Education, to improve mathematics education in the U. S.

Mariano Sigman

Universidad de Buenos Aires

Personal page: http://www.neurociencia.df.uba.ar/pubs.php

Email: mariuchu@gmail.com

Mariano Sigman was born in Argentina and grew up in Barcelona, Spain. He came back to Argentina and got a master degree in physics at the University of Buenos Aires. He moved to New York to do a PhD in neuroscience at the Rockefeller University directed by Charles Gilbert and Marcelo Magnasco. His thesis investigations were focused on visual perception, on the physiology and psychophysics of perceptual learning. He then moved to Paris, to do a postdoc with Stanislas Dehaene on consciousness and cognitive architecture. In 2006 he came back (again) to Argentina, as a professor in the Physics Department, where he currently is the director of the Integrative Neuroscience Laboratory.

Robert Stickgold

Harvard University

Personal page: http://sleep.med.harvard.edu/people/faculty/220/Robert+Stickgold+PhD

Email: rstickgold@hms.harvard.edu

Robert Stickgold is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His early research was on bacterial cell wall synthesis and bacterial DNA replication. His current work looks at the nature and function of sleep and dreams from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, with an emphasis on the role of sleep and dreams in memory consolidation and integration. In addition to studying the normal functioning of sleep, he is currently investigating alterations in sleep-dependent memory consolidation in a range of neurological and psychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, Parkinson’s disease, cocaine addicts, PTSD, insomnia, and sleep apnea.

Janet F. Werker

University of British Columbia

Personal page: http://infantstudies.psych.ubc.ca/

Email: jwerker@psych.ubc.ca

Janet Werker, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of Psychology at The University of British Columbia in Vancouver , BC , Canada . She received her B.A. from Harvard University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of British Columbia . Her first faculty position was at Dalhousie University in Halifax , Nova Scotia . She has been back at UBC since 1985. Her research involves the study of the precursors to language acquisition in infancy - speech perception, early word learning, cognitive development, and parent-infant communication. Her team study infants from hours after birth up to toddler hood using both behavioural and electrophysiological (ERP) techniques. She also examine these processes in infants growing up bilingual, and in infants with, or at risk for, developmental disabilities. Adult studies focus on speech perception and lexical processing of both spoken language and visual speech, and involve behavioural and neuroimaging studies.

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