See website at California Institute of Technology

Colin Camerer is a pioneer in behavioral economics and in neuroeconomics. He is interested in how psychological forces and their deeper neuroscientific foundations influence economic decisions involving individuals and markets. In his research, he uses experiments to better understand how individuals and markets function, neuroscience to gain insight into the neuroscientific drivers for decision making and behavior, and game theory. For example, he's exploring why price bubbles form, when they crash, and how people value immediate and future rewards and costs—especially those that create temptation. He wants to understand strategic situations such as when other people's choices affect an individual and how someone anticipates what others will do.

Camerer was on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago from 1991 to 1994, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania from 1983 to 1991, and the Kellogg Graduate School of Business at Northwestern University from 1981 to 1983. He was a visiting fellow at Stanford University from 1997 to 1998, a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation between 1991 and 1992, and a visiting professor of business at Caltech in 1987.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2003), a fellow of the Econometric Society (1993), and a fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (2011). He was president of the Society for Neuroeconomics (2005–2006) and president of the Economic Science Association (2001–2003). Since 2007, he has been a chair of the Russell Sage Foundation Behavioral Economics Roundtable. He has one patent accepted on "Active Learning Decision Engines." He is on editorial boards for numerous journals. In 2013, he was named a MacArthur Fellow.

See website at University of California, San Diego

Uma R. Karmarkar is an Assistant Professor at the Rady School of Management and in the School for Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Karmarkar holds dual Ph.D.’s in Neuroscience (UCLA), and in Marketing (Stanford GSB). Prior to her appointment at UCSD, she was a professor in the marketing unit of the Harvard Business School, and an affiliate of Harvard’s Center for Brain Sciences.

Dr. Karmarkar examines the factors that consciously and unconsciously influence how people make decisions, and the ensuing implications for marketplace practices. Her research combines psychology, behavioral economics, neuroscience and marketing in two main streams of research. The first stream examines how people use their (incomplete) information when they are faced with ambiguous decisions, and the biases that can emerge from consumer uncertainty. The second examines how companies’ decisions about how and when to offer information can frame consumers’ expectations and influence their purchase behavior. This work has been published in several leading academic journals and has received widespread attention from media outlets including the Economist and the New York Times.

See website at Inserm

Stefano Palminteri was born in 1982 in Palermo (Sicily, Italy), where he lived until he graduated from highschool (2000). He holds a Master degree in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology from the University of Bologna (Italy, 2006) and a Master degree in Cognitive and Behavioural Neuroscience from the University Pierre and Marie Curie (Paris, France, 2007). He holds a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University Pierre and Marie Curie (Paris, France, 2012). Stefano was a PhD student under the supervision of Dr Mathias Pessiglione, at the Brain and Spine Institute (Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris). His first post-doctoral position (2013) was at the Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives (ENS, Paris) and the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (University di Trento, Trento) in Giorgio Coricelli's team. His second post-doctoral position (2014-2015) was at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (University College London, London) in Sarah-Jayne Blakemore's team.

His last post-doctoral position was at the the Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives (ENS, Paris) in Etienne Koechlin's team. Currently, he is the head of the Human Reinforcement Learning team, which he created in 2017 thanks to the ATIP-Avenir programme and the Programme Emergence(s) of the Ville de Paris and recently (2021) is a visiting research scientist and the Higher School of Economics of Moscow (Russia)

See website at University of Pennsylvania

Michael Platt was selected as the sixteenth Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, effective July 1, 2015.

Platt, a neuroscientist whose work focuses on the brain’s decision-making processes, has appointments in the Department of Neuroscience in the Perelman School of Medicine, the Department of Psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Marketing in the Wharton School. He is also Director of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative.

Platt has served as Professor of Neurobiology, Director of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University. Organizations such as the National Foundation, the Klingenstein Foundation, the McDonnell Foundation and the Department of Defense have supported his research, and he has been recognized in the New York Times, the Washington post, the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, ABC, BBC and PBS.

Platt has also served as the President of the Society for Neuroeconomics. He holds a PhD in Biological Anthropology from Penn, and a BA in Biological Anthropology from Yale.

Antonio Rangel studies the computational and neurobiological basis of human decision making. He uses a variety of tools from neuroscience, economics, psychology, and computer science, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), single-unit recordings in human patients, eye-tracking, and computational modeling.

Those approaches are allowing Rangel and his research collaborators to pursue several avenues of inquiry. They are trying to understand how the brain assigns value to various options when faced with a choice, identifying the regions of the brain that encode those decisions. Eye-tracking experiments are revealing how the brain compares those assigned values to arrive at a decision. The researchers are also studying how the process of valuation changes when people exert control over their decisions—for example, when people try to exercise self-control in choosing to eat broccoli instead of chocolate cake. They are probing how such value is computed in social decision-making situations, such as when choosing to donate to charitable organizations and making decisions concerning moral behavior. Another question concerns how neural computations differ when making decisions for oneself versus for others. Rangel's lab is also interested in how neuroeconomics can be applied to design solutions to real-world problems at both the individual and societal level.

Prior to his time at Caltech, Rangel was on the faculty at Stanford University from 1998 to 2006. He was also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research between 1999 and 2007. He has served as the president of the Society for Neuroeconomics (2009–2010) and was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution (2000–2001). He has received a Mentor Recognition Award from the University of California, San Diego (2005), a Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Teaching (1997), and the Allyn Young Prize for Excellence in Teaching from Harvard (1997).

See website at Vanderbilt University

Dr. Jennifer Trueblood is Associate Professor of psychology and Chancellor Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University. She is interested in understanding (1) how people make decisions when faced with multiple alternatives, (2) how dynamically changing information affects decision processes, (3) how people reason about complex causal events, and (4) how different perspectives, contexts, and frames can lead to interference effects in decision-making and memory. To address these questions, she develops probabilistic and dynamic models that can explain behavior and uses hierarchical Bayesian methods for data analysis and model-based inference. She is currently an Associate Editor at Cognitive Psychology. She is a past president of the Society for Mathematical Psychology and currently helps co-organize the Women of Mathematical Psychology group.

See website at Queen’s Neuroeconomics Laboratory

Dr. Tusche is an Assistant Professor at Queen’s University (Departments of Psychology and Economics). Crossing the borders of established research disciplines, her research is part of the newly emerging field of neuroeconomics to study decision making (e.g., dietary choice, consumer choice, and cooperation). The overall goal of her research program is to build neurally informed computational models of human decision making that explain and predict differences in observed behaviors across people, context and time. Dr. Tusche has received a Ph.D. in Psychology from Humboldt University (Berlin, Germany) and postdoctoral research fellowships from the California Institute of Technology (USA) and the Max Planck Institute (Leipzig, Germany).