Elizabeth A. Buffalo, Ph.D.

Elizabeth Buffalo is the Wayne E. Crill Endowed Professor and Chair of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Dr. Buffalo is a neuroscientist exploring the neural mechanisms that support learning and memory. She is widely recognized for her studies on the relationships between eye movements and neural activity in the hippocampus and adjacent cortical structures, and for her discovery of grid cells in the macaque entorhinal cortex related to eye movements. Dr. Buffalo received a B.A. in Philosophy from Wellesley College, and an M.A. (Philosophy) and Ph.D. (Neurosciences) from the University of California, San Diego. She was a postdoctoral scholar in the Laboratory of Neuropsychology at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Buffalo joined the faculty at Emory University in 2005, and then moved her lab to the University of Washington in 2013. She has received several awards for her research including the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences for her innovative, multidisciplinary study of the hippocampus and the neural basis of memory. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Buffalo’s research focuses on understanding the neural mechanisms that support learning and memory. Using neurophysiological and spectral analysis techniques in monkeys and humans, she investigates how the activity of individual neurons and synchronized neural ensembles contributes to memory formation and retrieval. Her lab uses innovative approaches to understand the neural dynamics associated with learning and memory under diverse behavioral conditions, with a focus on naturalistic and ethologically relevant behavioral tasks. Her research has been supported by awards from the NIH and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and she was the 2011 recipient of the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences for her innovative, multidisciplinary study of the hippocampus and the neural basis of memory.

Current Project: Remapping across time, space and region

Past Project: Neural dynamics for a cognitive map in the macaque brain