Ann Duan joined the faculty at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre in summer 2021. She obtained her PhD in Neuroscience at Princeton University, where she studied prefrontal and collicular contributions to executive functions with Carlos Brody. In 2016, Ann became a Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain postdoctoral fellow in Ning-long Xu’s lab at the Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai, where she used circuit-level tools to investigate cortico-subcortical cooperation during decision formation and maintenance.

Ann’s long-term scientific goal centres around extracting general principles of neural computation that give rise to cognition. Her lab at SWC combines theory-motivated behavioural paradigms with modern experimental and analytical tools to conduct large-scale, cellular-resolution investigations of neural circuit mechanisms for flexible decision-making. In particular, she aims to understand how decision-making is modulated by internal and environmental variables, such as risk preference and competitive/cooperative social interaction.