Noa Ofen joins the Department of Psychology

I joined Wayne State University as an assistant professor in life-span cognitive neuroscience in August 2011 and was officially appointed in the Department of Psychology in August 2015. Before coming to Wayne State, I conducted postdoctoral research at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

I investigate structural and functional brain development across a wide age range of children and adults. Using tests of cognitive abilities combined with neuroimaging techniques, I study the neural underpinnings of cognition and how brain structure and function contribute to shaping human cognition. I am particularly interested in the structure and function of the hippocampus, a crucial brain structure for learning and memory. I also use experiments to study interactions between perception and memory and the many other factors that influence children's memory.

In some of my research projects, my goal is to identify the influence of an individual's life circumstances on their cognitive and brain development. In those studies, together with my team of collaborators and students, we look at the brain of children who were premature, we record memory-related activity directly from the brain of children with epilepsy, and we test environmental influences on development associated with disparities in an individual's socioeconomic status.

I am excited to be a part of the psychology department. I tremendously enjoy the interactions with both faculty and students. I have established strong research collaborations with other faculty in the department and I am highly committed to the training of both graduate and undergraduate students. This year, I had a lot of fun teaching Introduction to Psychology to a large audience of undergraduates from all across campus. I look forward to further enriching my program of research at Wayne State with the formal and informal contributions of other members of the department.