Ken Paller conducts cognitive neuroscience research at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he also serves as Director of the Training Program in the Neuroscience of Human Cognition. Ken’s collaborative research with his students and colleagues focuses on human memory, consciousness, and related issues. Recent research articles have examined sleep’s role in memory and memory dysfunction, sensory processing during sleep to reinforce prior learning, the neural substrates of conscious memory experiences, and the juxtaposition of those memory experiences with various ways in which memory can influence our behavior in the absence of awareness of memory retrieval, as in intuition. His investigations make use of various behavioral measures of memory, analyses of brain electrical activity from the EEG, patterns of cognitive deficits in neurological patients, and MRI methods.
Ken received a PhD in Neurosciences from UC San Diego following undergraduate training at UCLA. He held postdoctoral positions at Yale, Manchester, and Berkeley. He is a Fellow of the Mind and Life Institute, a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, journal editor at Neuropsychologia, and program committee chair for the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He received the Senator Mark Hatfield Award from the Alzheimer’s Association, and research funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and other federal agencies and private foundations.
