Kia Nobre

Kia Nobre joins Yale as Wu Tsai Professor in the Department of Psychology, Director of the Wu Tsai Center for Neurocognition and Behavior, and Associate Director of the Wu Tsai Institute. She is a cognitive neuroscientist interested in the organizing principles of the neural systems that support adaptive cognition and behavior in the human brain. Her research group is particularly well known for their innovative and multi-methodological studies of “attention” – on how the brain proactively and dynamically focuses on relevant information in memory and in the external environment to optimize perception, choice, action, and learning. Nobre’s research is recognized by many prestigious awards. She is a member of the British Academy, Academia Europaea, and the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S. She received the MRC Suffrage Science Award (2018), Broadbent Prize from the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (2019), Mentor Award from the Association for Psychological Sciences (2022), and de Carvalho Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science (2022). She serves the scientific community generously, acting on numerous advisory, editorial, funding, and jury boards.

Nobre grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She obtained her undergraduate degree from Williams College (1985), gained her Ph.D. at Yale University (1993), and completed postdoctoral training at Yale and Harvard. She then spent many years at the University of Oxford (1994-2023), where she recently held the Chair in Translational Cognitive Neuroscience.