Guest Speakers

Featured Faculty Speaker

"Coordination, conventions and collective intelligence"

Dora Biro, PhD
Beverly Petterson Bishop and Charles W. Bishop Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Bio

Dora Biro is the Beverly Petterson Bishop and Charles W. Bishop Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. She received her undergraduate and PhD degrees from the University of Oxford and subsequently held a JSPS postdoctoral research fellowship and a visiting professorship at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University, Japan, before returning to Oxford as a Royal Society University Research Fellow and later Professor of Animal Behaviour. She is the recipient of a L’Oreal-UNESCO “For Women in Science” fellowship, with research interests centered on animal cognition and collective animal behavior, including navigation, tool use, culture, and collective decisionmaking.

Featured Postdoctoral Fellow Speaker

"Rapid and dynamic construction of acoustically invariant speech representations in the human auditory" cortex

Dana Boebinger, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Norman-Haignere Lab

Bio

Dana Boebinger, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow working in the lab of Samuel Norman-Haignere, PhD, at the University of Rochester Medical Center. She received her doctoral degree from Harvard University’s Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology program, her master’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience from University College London as a Fulbright Scholar, and her undergraduate degrees in Psychology and Music at Florida State University. Her research focuses on how the human brain perceives and understands sounds like speech and music.

Featured Student Speaker

"Wired for Reciprocity: Corticogeniculate Networks Across the Visual System"

Matthew Adusei, PhD
Briggs Lab

Bio

Matthew Adusei is a recent PhD graduate of the Neuroscience Graduate Program at the University of Rochester Medical Center. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Lafayette College in 2019, and his PhD in Neuroscience in 2024. During his PhD, he worked in Dr. Farran Briggs' lab, focusing on structure-function characterizations of corticogeniculate neurons throughout the carnivore (ferret) and primate (macaque) visual systems. To support the final year of his thesis work, he was awarded a Joan Wright Goodman Dissertation Fellowship.

Matt is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. David Leopold's Laboratory at the National Institutes of Health, developing a safe and robust method for genetically modifying primate brain cells through ultrasound-guided fetal intracerebroventricular adeno-associated virus injections in marmosets and rats.