Chair in Translational Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Oxford

Cross-cutting theme lead: Neuroimaging and cognitive science

Email: kia.nobre@psy.ox.ac.uk

Phone: 01865 271356

I grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and completed my university education in the United States. I obtained my PhD (1993) and carried out postdoctoral research at Yale University, supervised by Gregory McCarthy, before joining Marsel Mesulam’s group at Harvard Medical School and then Northwestern University. I moved to Oxford in 1994 to take up a McDonnell-Pew Lectureship in Cognitive Neuroscience and a Junior Research Fellowship at New College. Prior to my current position (2014), I was a titular Professor at the Department of Experimental Psychology (Lecturer 1996–2002, Reader 2002–2006) and a Tutorial Fellow at New College, Oxford (1996–2014).

A cognitive neuroscientist, I am interested in understanding the organising principles of the neural systems that support adaptive cognition and behaviour in the human brain. My current research examines how the brain prioritises and selects information from the sensory stream and from memories at various time scales to form psychological experience and guide behaviour. In addition to revealing the basic mechanisms of these large-scale proactive and dynamic regulatory mechanisms, I am interested in how they develop over the lifespan and how they are disrupted in psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders.

My work combines behavioural methods (psychophysics, eye tracking, virtual reality) with innovative, non-invasive techniques to image and stimulate the human brain (magneto- and electroencephalography, magnetic resonance imaging, and brain stimulation).

Awards:
CL de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science (2022), Lifetime Association for Psychological Science (APS) Mentor Award (2021), International Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (2020), Fellow of the British Academy (2015), a Member of that Academia Europaea (2015), and received the Broadbent Prize (European Society for Cognitive Psychology) (2019) and the Suffrage Science Award (2016).

Positions:
Non-executive director of the Oxford Health Foundation Trust; Director, Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity, University of Oxford; Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator.