Sharon Thompson-Schill: Interim Director of Cognitive Neuroscience
Senior Vice Provost for Research Steven Fluharty announced the appointment of Dr. Sharon Thompson-Schill as Interim Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (CCN), effective October 1, 2010.
Dr. Thompson-Schill is Class of 1965 Professor of Psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences, as well as Director of Undergraduate Studies and Director (and founder) of the Undergraduate Honors Program in Psychology. She uses a combination of psychological and neuroscientific methods, in both healthy and brain-damaged individuals, to study the psychological, neurological, and genetic bases of complex thought and behavior, including topics in perception, memory, attention, language, and, more recently, personality and creativity.
A national board member of the Association for Psychological Science, she is the winner of a 2006 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, Penn’s highest teaching award, and an inaugural Penn Fellow, a program that recognizes and provides leadership development to select Penn faculty members in mid-career. She first came to Penn in 1996 as a postdoctoral fellow in psychology and neurology and then joined the Penn faculty in 1999. She earned a PhD in cognitive psychology from Stanford University and a BA in psychology from Davidson College.
Dr. Thompson-Schill succeeds Dr. Martha Farah, Annenberg Professor of Natural Sciences, who is now director of Penn’s Center for Neuroscience and Society.
The Center for Cognitive Neuroscience is a University-wide, multidisciplinary center dedicated to understanding the neural bases of human thought. Its research addresses central challenges of cognitive neuroscience–including perception, attention, learning, memory, language, decision-making, and emotion–through such diverse methods as neuroimaging, behavioral testing, magnetic stimulation, gene studies, computational modeling, and pharmacological intervention.
