Sara Matias, Ph.D.

Sara Matias is a mentor in the 2024 SURFiN program. She is a postdoctoral research associate in Naoshige Uchida’s lab at Harvard University. Matias holds a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon and a doctorate in bioengineering systems and neuroscience from MIT-Portugal Program and the Champalimaud Foundation. Her research focuses on how populations of dopamine neurons broadcast reward prediction error signals to implement distributional reinforcement learning in the basal ganglia. Matias is the recipient of the Human Frontier Science Program Long-term Postdoctoral Fellowship and the NARSAD Young Investigator Grant from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.

Principal Investigator: Naoshige Uchida