Rutgers Symposium on the Intersection of Cognitive, Sensory and Affective Neuroscience | Event Recap
The Rutgers Symposium on the Intersection of Cognitive, Sensory, and Affective Neuroscience was held on May 11th, 2026, at Masker’s Barn, Deserted Village of Feltville, Glenside Park. The full-day event was an interdisciplinary and cross-area meeting of Rutgers neuroscientists that aimed to foster interactions and build collaborations across PIs and their labs whose work touched on cognition and sensation with those who studied affective processes in health and neuropsychiatric illness. It featured keynote speakers Jacqueline Gottlieb, PhD, Professor of Neuroscience and Principal Investigator at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute, and Luiz Pessoa, PhD, Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland. The symposium represents a joint retreat of the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Focus Area Working Group and the Motivational and Affective Neuroscience Focus Area Working Group in the Rutgers Brain Health Institute (BHI) to specifically encourage cross-FAWG interactions and collaborations. It also aims to help facilitate work that crosses between basic science and clinical science with patient populations.
Keynote Speakers:
Jacqueline Gottlieb, PhD
Professor of Neuroscience; Principal Investigator at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute
Talk Title: “Uncertainty-based Regulation of Cognitive Functions”
Dr. Gottlieb studies the mechanisms that underlie the brain’s higher cognitive functions, including decision making, memory, and attention. She focuses on how the brain gathers the evidence it needs — and ignores what it doesn’t — during everyday tasks and during special states such as curiosity. Her work in nonhuman primates has helped reveal bridges between perception and action and provides insights relevant to several forms of psychopathology. She completed her PhD in Neurobiology at Yale University and her postdoctoral training at the National Eye Institute before joining the neuroscience faculty at Columbia University in 2001.
Luiz Pessoa, PhD
Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Maryland
Talk Title: “The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Motivation Are Interwoven”
Dr. Pessoa’s research centers around the interactions between cognition and emotion/motivation in the human brain. His work focuses on the highly interactive and modular nature of brain systems. He received an M.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and a PhD in computational neuroscience from Boston University. After serving on the faculty at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, he returned to the US as visiting fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health before joining the faculty in Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he also directs the Maryland Neuroimaging Center.
Poster Presentation
Trainees presented their work, shared new ideas, and engaged in collaborative discussions during the symposium. Ugne Ziausyte, MD/PhD student in Dr. Anna Konova’s lab, won the symposium’s poster award. View Ugne’s poster abstract.
