Leslie Ungerleider - F1000 Section Head (since 09 July 2001)
National Institute of Mental Health, Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA
BIOGRAPHY
CURRENT POSTION:Chief of the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at The National Institute of Mental Health
EDUCATION AND BACKGROUND:
Dr Ungerleider received her BA degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton and her PhD degree, with a major in Experimental Psychology, from New York University. During her postdoctoral training with Karl Pribram at Stanford University, she began her work on higher-order perceptual mechanisms in the cortex of primates. She moved to the NIMH in 1975, joining Mortimer Mishkin in the Laboratory of Neuropsychology. Their neurobehavioral work inspired their theory of 'two cortical visual systems', one specialized for object recognition and another for visuospatial perception.
MEMBERSHIPS, AWARDS:
Dr Ungerleider is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2001, she was the recipient of the Women in Neuroscience Lifetime Achievement Award and in 2008 she became an NIH Distinguished Investigator.
RESEARCH INTERSTS:
• To better understand the cortical mechanisms mediating perception and memory in nonhuman primates and humans.
• To explore the relationship between single-cell recordings studies of primates and functional brain imaging studies of perception and memory in humans.
• To determine how 'top-down' influences of attention and memory affect perceptual processing.