Linda Moya

Distinguished Service Professor, Social and Decision Sciences (SDS), Heinz College Affiliated Faculty, Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), Carnegie Mellon University Neuroscience Institute

Bio

Linda Moya received her PhD in Psychology/Cognitive Neuroscience, and her Masters of Philosophy in Public Policy and Management from Carnegie Mellon University in 2011. She has a Masters of Science in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University and a Bachelors of Science and Engineering in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University. Prior to pursuing her PhD, Linda spent 17 years in the computer and telecommunications industries in various engineering, middle and executive management positions at Hewlett-Packard and AT&T. Immediately prior to pursuing her PhD Linda co-founded a wireless startup that was sold to Nokia in 2003.

Research

Linda's primary pedagogical and research interests are in the neuroscience of decision making, with an focus on how the social and emotional brain affect the decision making process. Methodologically, she has conducted behavioral experiments with human participants using psychophysiology and neuroimaging methods: MEG, EEG and structural MRI. Scientifically, she has tested a priori hypotheses based on theory developed from extant literature from across neuroscience sub-disciplines: systems, behavioral, decision, and cognitive; while at the same time being open to unexpected and unpredicted but robust patterns of results in the data born of sophisticated statistical learning techniques.

Linda'a dissertation, "The Microgenesis of Object-based vis-a-vis Space-based Visual Attention", is intended to address in part how these two forms of visual attention are "implemented" in the brain, in terms of characterizing the electromagnetic fields present in scalp surface recordings during visual attention cognitive processing. The dissertation research describes the nature of how these attention processes unfold over time, differentially across the brain, and how their composition change over time and space.