Dr. Timothy Verstynen

Biography

Timothy Verstynen is an Associate Professor at the Carnegie Mellon Neuroscience Institute with a courtesy appointment in Biomedical Engineering. He received his B.A. in Psychology from the University of New Mexico in 2001 and earned his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006. His postdoctoral training included positions at the University of California, San Francisco, where he explored the computational mechanisms of fast adaptive priors in visually-guided reaching, and the University of Pittsburgh, where he focused on developing novel diffusion imaging approaches to map white matter pathways. Dr. Verstynen's research investigates how humans and mammals flexibly select actions in noisy contexts, utilizing feedback to modify decision policies and exploit future opportunities. He is particularly interested in the architecture of cortico-basal ganglia-thalamic loops that support adaptive decision-making. By integrating psychophysics, neuroimaging approaches, and computational modeling, he aims to build tractable theories of exploratory behavior and investigate the underlying mechanisms at various levels of analysis.

Research Interests

Experience

Awards