Toward a Science of Consciousness

Apr 9-14, 2012

PLENARY

Cynthia Moss

Cynthia F. Moss received a B.S. (summa cum laude) from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1979 and a Ph.D. from Brown University in 1986. She was a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Tübingen (1985-1987) and a Research Fellow at Brown University (1987-1989) before accepting a faculty appointment at Harvard University, beginning in 1989.   At Harvard, Dr. Moss received the Phi Beta Kappa teaching award (1992) and was named the Morris Kahn Associate Professor (1994).  In 1995, Dr. Moss moved to the University of Maryland, where she is now a Professor in the Department of Psychology and ISR. She served as Director of the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program (2004-2007) and is currently Co-Director of the Computer and Signal Processing Core of the NINDS P-30 Center for Comparative and Evolutionary Biology of Hearing. She is a member of the Society for Neuroscience, the Acoustical Society of America, International Society for Neuroethology, and the Association for Research in Otolaryngology. Her lab includes undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral researchers, supported by funds from NSF, NIH, AFOSR, Howard Hughes, the Whitehall Foundation, and private industry. Dr. Moss received an NSF Young Investigator Award in 1992 and a Berlin Institute for Advanced Studies Fellowship in 2000 and 2008. In 2001, Moss was elected a Fellow to the Acoustical Society of America. Moss and her graduate student, Kaushik Ghose, won first place in the multimedia division of the NSF-AAAS Visualization Challenge in 2004. In 2009 Moss and ISR colleagues Horiuchi and Krishnaprasad were awarded ISR Outstanding Systems Faculty of the Year. In 2010 she was recognized with the University of Maryland Regents Faculty Award for Research and Creativity. She has edited two books and published over 75 chapters and research articles.

Moss’s research program is directed at understanding sensory information processing and adaptive motor control. In the Moss lab, the echolocating bat serves as a model system for a neuroethologically-based study of hearing, tactile sensing, and perceptually-guided behavior. Research combines acoustical, psychophysical, perceptual, computational and neurophysiological studies, with the goal of developing integrative theories on brain-behavior relations in animal systems.