WIRTH, Sylvia, DPhil.

Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, 
UMR CNRS 5229, Université Claude Bernard
67 Boulevard Pinel
69675 BRON cedex
France
swirth [at] isc.cnrs.fr
tel: 33 4 37 91 12 32

Dr. Sylvia Wirth is a researcher at the Center for Cognitive Science in Lyon, France. She obtained her doctoral degree in Neuroscience from Louis Pasteur University, Strasbourg, France, dedicated to the understanding of olfactory memory in rodents. She went on a post-doctoral training at New York University characterizing the neural activity underlying memory formation in the medial temporal lobe in the non-human primates. As a tenured researcher of the CNRS since 2010, she has pursued her interest in studying the neural underpinnings of cognition, addressing topics such as spatial representation and, more recently, social interactions. She uses combines state of the art electrophysiology and virtual reality techniques adapted to non-human primates, as well as naturalistic approaches involving monitoring of freely moving animals interacting with their environment. She is an author of numerous academic papers published in high impact journals such as Science, Neuron, Plos Biology, the Journal of Neuroscience, Cerebral Cortex, PNAS. Recently, her discovery of “schema cells” in the macaque hippocampus, was awarded the best discovery of the year in biology by the French Academy of Science. The results provide evidence for the existence of a high level of cognitive abstraction in the macaque, a species that does not have access to symbolic language. At the neurophysiological level, the results show how neurons in the hippocampus provide a powerful data compression mechanism that encodes recurring events according to a common schema. Her current research is funded by the French National Research Agency and her team is part of the laboratory of excellence Labex Cortex. https://neuroprimcog.wixsite.com/cogneuro

Sze Chai KWOK, DPhil.
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
School of Psychology and Cognitive Science
Shanghai Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics
Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics
East China Normal University

Tel: +86 (0)21 20596020
Email: sze-chai.kwok [at] st-hughs.ox.ac.uk
Twitter: @Kwokszechai
 

Kwok’s research lies at the intersection between neuroscience, behavior, and psychology. His research team (http://www.kwoklab.org/) studies the neural bases of episodic memory, metacognition, and other related higher cognitive processes in the primate species. Elucidation of such intricate brain/mind/behavior relationships is attained by armamentaria of methods including multimodal neuroimaging, in vivo electrophysiology, neuromodulatory methods, state-of-the-art behavioral paradigms and computational techniques. 

He is author of 40 academic papers including several in leading high impact journals such as Science, Neuron, eLife, the Journal of Neuroscience, and Nature Human Behaviour. He is recipient of Shanghai Pujiang Talent Program Award (2016) and Young IBRO Regions Connecting Award (2020). He serves as Handling Editor in the journal Cognitive Processing (Springer) and Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

Kwok obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Oxford in Experimental Psychology and a bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences from the University of Hong Kong. He holds a Scholar in Residence adjunct position at NYU Shanghai.