Profile
Akram Bakkour
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology and the College
Akram Bakkour’s research focuses on the cognitive and neural mechanisms by which relational memory contributes to decision making. Although it may seem obvious that many decisions rely on memory, how memories enter the decision process and the brain mechanisms that support such a process remain unknown. To explore the interactions between memory and decision making, Bakkour uses a combination of functional brain imaging, eye tracking, computational modeling, machine learning, and neuropsychological studies with patients who have known cognitive deficits.
His work has been published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Nature Neuroscience, eLife, Cerebral Cortex, Hippocampus, NeuroImage, Neurology, PLOS One, and Frontiers in Psychology.
Bakkour earned his PhD in neuroscience at the University of Texas at Austin and his ScB in neuroscience at Brown University. He was an associate research scientist and postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Psychology and the Zuckerman Institute, Columbia University. Prior to that he was a study coordinator in the Department of Psychiatry and the Massachusetts Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Photo credit: Mohsen Ben Cheick