Jonathan D. Cohen

Jonathan D. Cohen is the Robert Bendheim and Lynn Bendheim Thoman Professor in Neuroscience, Professor of Psychology, and founding Co-director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute at Princeton University. His areas of research are theory and computation and human neuroscience.

Research in Cohen's lab focuses on the neurobiological mechanisms underlying cognitive control, and their disturbance in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and depression. Cognitive control is the ability to guide attention, thought and action in accord with goals or intentions. One of the fundamental mysteries of neuroscience is how this capacity for coordinated, purposeful behavior arises from the distributed activity of many billions of neurons in the brain. Cohen's work aims to develop formally explicit hypotheses about the functioning of these systems, and to test these hypotheses in empirical studies. Two driving motivations for Cohen's work are understanding how the computational architecture of the brain gives rise to its unique flexibility and efficiency of function, and the exploitation of such understanding in the development of a theoretically sound foundation for research on the relationship between disturbances of brain function and their manifestation as disorders of thought and behavior in psychiatric illness. 

Cohen earned his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.