Anne Churchland, Ph.D.
Inaugural Chairholder
Dr. Anne Churchland is a Professor in Neurobiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Her training included undergraduate studies at Wellesley College, a Ph.D. from UCSF, and postdoctoral training at the University of Washington. She began her independent research career at Cold Spring Harbor in 2010 and remained there until coming to UCLA in 2020. The focus of her laboratory is understanding how auditory and visual stimuli are processed by the brain and used to guide decision-making. She combines experimental work with analysis and theoretical modeling to understand the neural circuits that perform the necessary computations for these decisions. She is also the co-founder and executive board member of the International Brain Laboratory, serves on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health, and was a member of the BRAIN2.0 Working Group for the BRAIN Initiative.