Marlene Cohen
Professor
Department of Neurobiology and the College
Marlene Cohen’s research uses a deep integration of physiological, behavioral, and computational methods to study how visual information is encoded in the visual cortex, what information the visual cortex transmits to downstream areas, and the relationship between cognition, perception, and behavior. More recently, her work has employed clinical methods (e.g., drugs used to treat disorders that affect the brain) to test basic science hypotheses and explore clinical applications of knowledge from curiosity-driven research.
She is a recipient of the Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology, a Klingenstein-Simons Neuroscience Fellowship, a Whitehall Foundation Grant, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences.
Cohen earned BS degrees in mathematics and brain and cognitive science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her PhD in neuroscience from Stanford University and conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School that used visual attention as a tool to understand which aspects of a cortical population code are important. Most recently, she was a professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh, where she also served as the associate director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition.