A neural population journey from MT to the clinic

Marlene Cohen, Ph.D.
University of Chicago

Award Presentation and Lecture
Reception to follow

Bob Wurtz’s pioneering work profoundly influenced the field of neuroscience, challenging researchers to explore how individual neurons and neural circuits within the visual and oculomotor systems give rise to complex cognitive behaviors. Building on this legacy, recent technological advances in neural recording, manipulation, and computational modeling now allow researchers to study these circuits at an unprecedented level of detail. Dr. Cohen’s laboratory is leveraging these powerful tools to investigate how populations of visual and oculomotor neurons integrate information across multiple stimuli, tasks, and cognitive processes—revealing how this information is dynamically formatted within the brain. Dr. Cohen will share new, unpublished findings that highlight how these approaches are opening fresh avenues of discovery. They not only deepen our fundamental understanding of brain function—such as the distinct contributions of different regions to visually guided decision-making—but also hold promise for translational applications, including the diagnosis and treatment of cognitive disorders.

About

Dr. Marlene Cohen is a Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Neuroscience Institute at the University of Chicago, where her group studies the neural basis of vision and cognition. She received bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, completed her PhD at Stanford University studying how interactions between neurons depend on behavioral goals, and did her postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School using attention to study flexible neuronal population codes. She started her laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh in 2011 and moved to the University of Chicago in 2022. She has received the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the Eppendorf and Science Prize for Neurobiology, a Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award in the Neurosciences, a Whitehall Foundation Grant, a National Institutes of Health Pathway to Independence Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and a McKnight Scholar Award. Dr. Cohen’s laboratory uses a combination of behavioral, neurophysiological, and computational methods to understand neural coding and the neural computations underlying cognitively complex behavior. Most recently, her group has extended their work to use systems and computational neuroscience approaches to aid the early detection and eventual treatment of cognitive disorders like Alzheimer’s disease.