Mariam Aly is an Acting Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she joined the faculty in 2024. She earned her H.B.Sc. in Psychology from the University of Toronto in 2008, M.A. in Psychology from the University of California, Davis in 2010, and Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Davis in 2013. Prior to Berkeley, Aly was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University from 2017 to 2024 and conducted postdoctoral research at Princeton University's Neuroscience Institute until 2017. She directs the Aly Lab, which studies the mechanisms by which attention and perception influence memory for the world around us and how memory guides attention, perception, prediction, and goal-directed behavior. Her research integrates behavioral experiments, eye tracking, functional neuroimaging, computational modeling, lesion studies, and pharmacological manipulations to explore hippocampal and medial prefrontal contributions to these processes.

Aly's scholarship has garnered over 3,000 citations, with influential publications including "The brain hierarchically represents the past and future during multistep anticipation" (Nature Communications, 2024, co-first author), "Switching between external and internal attention in hippocampal networks" (Journal of Neuroscience, 2023), "Attentional fluctuations and the temporal organization of memory" (Cognition, 2023), "Attention promotes episodic encoding by stabilizing hippocampal representations" (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2016), "Attention stabilizes representations in the human hippocampus" (Cerebral Cortex, 2016), and "Detecting changes in scenes: The hippocampus is critical for strength-based perception" (Neuron, 2013). Her achievements include the NSF CAREER Award (2019–2026), Association for Psychological Science Rising Star Award (2019), NARSAD Young Investigator Grant from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (2020–2022), Psychonomic Society Fellow status (2018–), Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching at Columbia University (2022), and multiple dissertation-year fellowships. Aly holds editorial roles as Consulting Editor for the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience and Guest Editor for Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Her work elucidates how memory systems extend beyond storage to shape real-world cognition and behavior.

Professional Email: mariamaly@berkeley.edu