Rate My Professor Aron Barbey

Aron Barbey serves as the Andrew J. McKenna Family Professor and Director of the Notre Dame Human Neuroimaging Center at the University of Notre Dame. He also directs the Decision Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology. His research investigates how intelligence emerges from the network organization and dynamics of the human connectome, drawing on methods from cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology, and computer science. The work focuses on advancing understanding of the neural foundations of intelligence and supporting applications in cognitive enhancement, neurorehabilitation, and biologically inspired artificial intelligence.

Barbey earned his Ph.D. in Psychology from Emory University in 2007 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health from 2007 to 2011. He began his faculty career at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011, where he was promoted to full professor in the Departments of Psychology and Bioengineering in 2019. During his time at Illinois, he held leadership roles including Director of the Center for Brain Plasticity, Director of the Intelligence, Learning, and Plasticity Initiative, and Chair of the Intelligent Systems Research Theme at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. He subsequently served as the Mildred Francis Thompson Professor and Director of the Center for Brain, Biology and Behavior at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln before joining Notre Dame. Over his career, Barbey’s research group has secured more than $26 million in funding from sources including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Defense, the White House BRAIN Initiative, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and private sponsors such as Abbott Nutrition, Google Brain, and PepsiCo. He has received multiple research awards, including the Mensa Foundation Prize for innovation in the neuroscience of human intelligence. Barbey is co-editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence and Cognitive Neuroscience and The Sage Handbook of Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience, and editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Enhancement and Brain Plasticity. In 2023, he joined the Defense Science Study Group at the Institute for Defense Analyses. His primary area is Cognition, Brain, and Behavior, with additional work in Clinical areas.