Nick Turk-Browne, PhD

Nick Turk-Browne is Director of the Wu Tsai Institute and Professor with primary appointment in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and secondary appointments in the Departments of Neurosurgery and Psychiatry and the Child Study Center in the School of Medicine. He is also a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (since 2016). Nick obtained an HBSc from the University of Toronto in 2004 and a PhD from Yale University in 2009, then served on the faculty at Princeton University from 2009-2017. His research takes an integrative perspective, using behavioral studies, functional magnetic resonance imaging, intracranial recording/stimulation, and computational modeling to understand how cognitive and neural systems interact in the human brain. He has published extensively on how we perceive and attend to the world, and how we learn from experience and store information in memory. His lab has recently pioneered techniques for brain imaging in awake and behaving infants and toddlers. Nick's work has been published in leading journals and featured in major news outlets. His research has been funded by federal agencies, philanthropic foundations, and corporate partners. He received young investigator awards from the American Psychological Association (2015), Vision Sciences Society (2016), Cognitive Neuroscience Society (2017), and Society of Experimental Psychologists (2018), as well as the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences (2025).