Megan A. K. Peters

Who I am

I am an Associate Professor in the UCI Department of Cognitive Sciences.  I’m also an affiliate faculty member of the UCI Department of Logic & Philosophy of Science, a Fellow in the UCI Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and the UCI Center for Theoretical Behavioral Sciences, and a Fellow in the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Brain Mind & Consciousness program. 

I am also President, Co-founder, and Chairperson of the Board of Directors at Neuromatch, where we have built a scalable, accessible, and democratized educational platform serving 30,000+ students in 120+ countries globally across computational neurosciences, deep learning, computational climate science, and neuroAI.

Previously, I was on the faculty at UC Riverside in the Department of Bioengineering, with affiliations in the Department of Psychology and the Interdepartmental Graduate Program in Neuroscience. I received my Ph.D. in computational cognitive neuroscience from the UCLA Psychology Department, having worked with Ladan Shams, and then was a postdoc there working with Hakwan Lau.

What I care about

My research aims to reveal how the brain represents and uses uncertainty, and performs adaptive computations based on noisy, incomplete information. I specifically focus on how these abilities support metacognitive evaluations of the quality of (mostly perceptual) decisions, and how these processes might relate to phenomenology or subjective experience in both biological and artificial systems. I use neuroimaging (fMRI, EEG) in humans, computational modeling, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and neural stimulation techniques to study these topics. 

I am also passionate about developing new approaches to collaborative scientific research and education that break down geopolitical and financial barriers to success, including what we need to do to promote equity in credit assignment in modern neuroscience and related disciplines. Ask me about how Neuromatch represents the future of democratized education and computational sciences on this planet!