Kari Hoffman is associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, specializing in computational primate neuroethology within the Vanderbilt Brain institute, the Data Science Institute, the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Psychology. Her research investigates how neural circuits organize and adapt to allow an organism to build and apply knowledge effectively.
Hoffman’s lab uses naturalistic, contingent tasks with primate models to understand brain function in real-world contexts, focusing on how memories are structured over time. To understand neural population organization during and after learning, her team uses high-density, wireless multisite ensemble recordings. These neural and behavioral measures are then compared with computational models of learning and generalization.
Hoffman earned her Ph.D. in systems and computational neuroscience from the University of Arizona and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of Nikos Logothetis at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen, Germany. Her contributions to neuroscience have been recognized with Sloan and Whitehall fellowships, an Ontario Early Researcher Award, and designation as a Kavli fellow.