Aron Barbey
Primary Research Area
- Bioimaging at Multi-Scale
For More Information
- Decision Neuroscience Laboratory
- Decision Neuroscience Laboratory on Twitter
- Center for Brain, Biology & Behavior
Biography
Aron Keith Barbey is Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame, where he directs the Human Neuroimaging Center and the Decision Neuroscience Laboratory. He began his academic career at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011 and was promoted to Full Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Bioengineering in 2019. During his time at Illinois, he held several leadership positions, including Director of the Center for Brain Plasticity, Director of the Intelligence, Learning, and Plasticity Initiative, and Chair of the Intelligent Systems Research Theme at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. He later served as the Mildred Francis Thompson Professor and Director of the Center for Brain, Biology and Behavior at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Dr. Barbey's research investigates how intelligence emerges from the network organization and dynamics of the human connectome, applying methods from network neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and computer science. His work aims to achieve a deeper understanding of the neural foundations of intelligence and to enable scientific innovation in cognitive enhancement, neurorehabilitation, and biologically inspired artificial intelligence.
Over the course of his career, Dr. Barbey's research group has won more than $26 million in research funding, with support from organizations including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Defense, the White House BRAIN Initiative, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and private industry sponsors such as Abbott Nutrition, Google Brain, and PepsiCo.
Dr. Barbey has received several honors for his contributions to the field, including the Mensa Foundation Prize for his work on the neuroscience of intelligence. He is co-editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence and Cognitive Neuroscience and The SAGE Handbook of Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience and serves as editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Enhancement and Brain Plasticity. In 2023, he was selected to join the Defense Science Study Group at the Institute for Defense Analyses.
He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Emory University and completed postdoctoral training in the Cognitive Neuroscience Section of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health.
Education
- Ph.D., Psychology, Emory University
Academic Positions
- Adjunct Professor, Department of Bioengineering
- Director, Notre Dame Human Neuroimaging Center
Journal Editorships
- Associate Editor, Cortex
- Editorial Board, Intelligence
- Editorial Board, Thinking & Reasoning
- Editorial Board, Trends in Neuroscience and Education
Research Interests
- Our research investigates the principles of brain organization that underlie executive control, reasoning and decision making. Through a combination of human behavioral, computational modeling, functional neuroimaging (fMRI) and neuropsychological patient data, we seek to uncover the mechanisms that shape higher cognitive processes and to develop predictive models of brain function that link neural systems to specific patterns of inference and behavior. An important motivation for our work is the development of a theoretically sound foundation for research on the relationship between disturbances of brain function and their manifestation as disorders of thought and behavior in psychiatric illness and neurological disease.
Primary Research Area
- Bioimaging at Multi-Scale
Selected Articles in Journals