معرفی
Zachary Mainen is a Professor and Principal Investigator at the Champalimaud Foundation's Systems Neuroscience lab, leading research on neural mechanisms underlying perception, decision-making, and serotonergic modulation. His lab investigates how the brain constructs internal models of the world and evaluates sensory data to guide actions, with a focus on serotonin's role in cognitive processes and behavioral persistence.
Mainen holds a PhD in Neuroscience and has extensive experience in electrophysiology, optogenetics, and computational modeling. His research integrates behavioral experiments with neural recordings in rodents to address questions about uncertainty, confidence, and neural circuit dynamics.
Key areas of interest include olfactory processing, spatial navigation, stress physiology, and the neural basis of decision-making. He has mentored numerous PhD and postdoctoral researchers, fostering collaborations across institutions via initiatives like the International Brain Laboratory.
Mainen's work has been published in top journals such as Nature, Neuron, and Nature Human Behaviour, with recent focus on serotonin's role in behavioral persistence and stress-induced controllability perception.
