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 an elected member of the Board of Directors at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, and advisor to several corporations and nonprofits including Conscium and PRISM.

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 and community-building enterprise serving 40,000+ participants (13,000+ in our interactive Academies alone) in 130+ 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) inferences, and how these processes might relate to phenomenology or subjective experience in both biological and artificial systems. I use psychophysics, neuroimaging (fMRI, mostly) in humans, computational modeling, and machine learning and artificial intelligence to study these topics. See our lab website for more. 

I am also passionate about developing new approaches to collaborative scientific research and education that break down geopolitical and financial barriers to success. This includes:

• exploring what we need to do to promote equity in credit assignment in modern neuroscience and related disciplines

• developing best practices in large scientific collaborations, through launching and supporting  the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Generative Adversarial Collaboration project (TICS paper!) and leading branches of two adversarial collaborations on consciousness: Empirical Tests of Higher Order Theories of Consciousness and First Order versus Higher Order theories (described in more detail on our lab website)

• launching funding initiatives for early career researchers in consciousness science and related disciplines, including the Fund Consciousness Science initiative

• building Neuromatch's programs to realize the potential of democratized education and computational sciences on this planet!