Kia Nobre, PhD

Kia Nobre is a cognitive neuroscientist interested in the organizing principles of the brain systems that support adaptive human cognition and behavior. Her research group is notably well known for their innovative and multi-methodological studies of “attention” – on how the brain proactively and dynamically focuses on relevant information in memory and in the external environment to optimize perception, choice, action, and learning. Nobre’s research is recognized by many prestigious awards. She is a member of the British Academy, Academia Europaea, an international fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, and an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received the MRC Suffrage Science Award (2018), the Broadbent Prize from the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (2019), the Mentor Award from the Association for Psychological Sciences (2022), the de Carvalho Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science (2022), and the Fred Kavli Distinguished Career Contributions Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (2024). She serves the scientific community generously, acting on numerous advisory, editorial, funding, and jury boards. At the Wu Tsai Institute, Nobre is establishing a core facility for researchers to investigate the building blocks of human cognition with the most advanced methods to measure the human brain and behavior informed by cutting-edge analysis and computational techniques. In tandem, she is creating a new program to foster knowledge-sharing between scientists, experts in other sectors, and the public to connect scientific discoveries with pressing societal issues in a meaningful and multilateral way.

electroencephalography ;  eyetracking ;  functional magnetic resonance imaging ;  positron emission tomography ;  psychophysics ;  virtual reality  

attention ;  cognition ;  cognitive neuroscience ;  long-term memory ;  working memory  

Nobre grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She obtained her undergraduate degree from Williams College (1985), her PhD at Yale University (1993), and completed postdoctoral training at Yale and Harvard. She then spent many years at the University of Oxford (1994-2023). At Oxford, she held the first Junior Research Fellowship in Experimental Psychology (1994), was the first female science fellow at New College (1996), and became the inaugural Chair in Translational Cognitive Neuroscience (2014). In 2023, she joined the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale as its Associate Director and as Director of the Center for Neurocognition and Behavior.