Lila Davachi

Lila Davachi joins FAS as Professor of Psychology. She received her bachelor's degree in psychology from Barnard College and her PhD in Neurobiology from Yale University, where she trained under Patricia Goldman-Rakic, and then conducted her postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Davachi started her research group at New York University in 2004, where she was Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and served as Director of the Center for Learning, Memory and Emotion, before moving to Columbia University in 2017 and returning to Yale.  

Davachi’s scientific contributions have shed light on how dynamic experiences are transformed into lasting memories and how they update existing knowledge, with an emphasis on behavioral and neuroimaging investigations into how humans encode and consolidate experience, leading to discoveries spanning sequential event representations, hippocampal subfield dynamics, and the impact of post-encoding neural activity on memory.  

Davachi is a recipient of the Young Investigator Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (2009) and Columbia University's Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award, has served as a Provost's Senior Faculty Teaching Scholar, and is an elected member of the Memory Disorders Research Society (MDRS), Society of Experimental Psychologists (SEP) and the Association for Psychological Science (APS).