معرفی
Yael Niv is a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, specializing in reinforcement learning, decision-making, and computational cognitive neuropsychiatry. Her work bridges neural mechanisms with clinical applications for psychiatric disorders including depression, OCD, schizophrenia, and addiction.
Her academic foundation includes:
- Ph.D., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Dr. Niv employs computational models to dissect how attention and memory interact with reinforcement learning, emphasizing normative explanations for brain algorithms. Her lab prioritizes model-based experimentation to define testable hypotheses about behavior. Recent expansion into computational cognitive neuropsychiatry leverages these tools for diagnosing and treating mental illness through the Rutgers-Princeton Center for Computational Cognitive Neuropsychiatry.
Analysis of her recent publications reveals dominant trends in computational psychiatry: reinforcement learning models applied to depression/anxiety symptomatology, fear extinction mechanisms, and emotion-decision interactions. Key subfields include latent-cause inference, reward sensitivity in social contexts, and schema-based representation learning.
She received the Graduate Mentoring Award for exceptional guidance of graduate students. Her research is supported by major collaborative funding, notably a $16 million grant for the Rutgers-Princeton Center advancing mental illness research.
Dr. Niv advises Branson Byers, Jamie Chiu, Sevan Harootonian, and Dan-Mircea Mirea. She leads the Niv Lab in developing computational frameworks for clinical translation, with ongoing projects focused on personalizing cognitive behavioral therapy and modeling psychiatric symptom networks.
