Elizabeth Anya Phelps

Dr. Elizabeth Anya Phelps is the Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science, New York University. Phelps has contributed to scientific understanding of the role of emotion in learning, memory, and decision-making. She pioneered studies focusing on emotion at a time when it was rarely studied in cognitive sciences. Over the course of her career, she has learned and implemented neuroscientific methods hitherto unexploited in psychology, becoming a leader in cognitive neuroscience. Phelps has demonstrated the amygdala's critical involvement in human fear learning and the modulation of episodic memory consolidation. She undertook computational characterizations of how the amygdala contributes to the learning process, and moved beyond basic demonstrations to apply her ideas in techniques to diminish, control, or eliminate fears. She also showed that, similar to what is known from animal models, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is important in inhibiting the amygdala and the fear response with extinction learning, and that the hippocampus plays a role in the contextual modulation of fear expression. Phelps has utilized interdisciplinary approaches to examine how the brain represents the social learning of fear and how this might play a role in the implicit expression of race attitudes. She also demonstrated how one can target memory reconsolidation to rewrite fear memories and persistently inhibit fear expression. Phelps has collaborated with social psychologists and behavioral economists and made contributions to both social neuroscience and neuroeconomics in addition to her own discipline of cognitive neuroscience.

Dr. Phelps utilizes a broad, multidisciplinary approach to answer focused questions, leading her work to be of relevance and utility to diverse fields. Current research in her lab is focused in four areas: (1) extending animal models of emotional learning to human behavior, (2) emotion's influence in episodic memory, (3) the impact of emotion on perception, attention, and expression, and (4) extending the basic mechanisms of emotional learning to social behavior, decision making, and economics.

 Dr. Phelps received her BA from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1984 and Phd from Princeton University in 1989. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, Association for Psychological Science, and Society for Experimental Psychology, and has received numerous awards for her work. Her articles appear in Current Biology, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.