Dora Angelaki, Ph.D.

Dora Angelaki is a professor of neural science at the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University. She holds a diploma and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and biomedical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and the University of Minnesota. Her general area of interest is computational, cognitive and systems neuroscience. Within this broad field, she specializes in the neural mechanisms of spatial perception and navigation using rodents, humans and non-human primates as a model. She is interested in neural coding and how complex, cognitive behavior is produced by neuronal populations. Angelaki has received many honors and awards, including the inaugural Pradel Research Award in Neuroscience from the National Academy of Sciences (2012), the Grass Lectureship from the Society of Neuroscience (2011), the Hallpike-Nylen medal from the Bárány Society (2006) and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (1996). In 2014, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Angelaki’s research focuses on understanding how multisensory information flows between subcortical and cortical brain areas, as well as the spatial navigation, decision-making and episodic memory circuits, and how internal states modulate this information flow. Her lab uses innovative approaches to explore and understand neural dynamics and network coding of multisensory and multimodal information at multiple stages of processing under diverse naturalistic and perceptual contexts related to navigation, planning and perceptual decisions. Her lab is interested in the neural implementation of canonical neural computations and how they go astray to result in sensory, motor, memory and cognitive deficits in diseases like autism and schizophrenia. The goal of the lab is to use this knowledge to understand computational principles of disease, to inspire artificial systems and to aid the development of prosthetics and other tools for understanding and treating deficits of sensory coding, spatial orientation, cognition and action.