Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science
Department of Psychology, New York University
Associate Director, Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Decision Making
Elizabeth A. Phelps is the Lab Director at New York University'ʹs Department of Psychology. Her research examines the cognitive neuroscience of emotion, learning and memory. Her primary focus has been to understand how human learning and memory are changed by emotion and to investigate the neural systems mediating their interactions. Phelps has approached this topic from a number of different perspectives, with an aim of achieving a more global understanding of the complex relations between emotion and memory. As much as possible, she has tried to let the questions drive the research, not the techniques or traditional definitions of research areas. She uses a number of techniques (behavioral studies, physiological measurements, brain—lesion studies, fMRI) and has worked with a number of collaborators in other domains (social and clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, economists, physicists). She believes that having focused questions and a broad approach to answering these questions has enhanced the overall quality of her research program and the cross—disciplinary relevance and appeal of her work.