Bio:

Anne K. Churchland is a Professor in the department of Neurobiology at UCLA. She received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco, advised by Dr. Stephen Lisberger. She then did a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Michael Shadlen at the University of Washington in the Physiology and Biophysics Department. Her postdoctoral work focused on mechanisms of decision making in nonhuman primates and included both experimental and theoretical work, funded by a Pathways to Independence (K99) Award from the National Eye Institute. In 2010, she started her own laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, before moving to UCLA in 2020. In starting her own laboratory, Professor Churchland began studying decision making using rodent models to take advantage of emerging tools for circuit dissection which are readily available in rodents. Since then, her laboratory has been a major player in bringing behavioral paradigms to rodents that have been successful in elucidating neural mechanisms in primates. These include perceptual decision making and multisensory integration.

Throughout her career, Professor Churchland has been the recipient of awards from the McKnight Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Klingenstein-Simons Foundation, the John Merck Fund, the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain, and the Chapman Foundations. In addition to her scientific work, Professor Churchland runs science outreach activities at public schools and co-directs the Undergraduate Research Program at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Bioinformatics and Computational Neuroscience. She is also on the executive committee for the Computational and Systems Neuroscience conference which aims to bring theorists and experimentalists together to discuss new findings in the field.