Rate My Professor Michael Barkasi

Michael Barkasi earned his B.A. in Philosophy from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania in 2009, graduating summa cum laude with minors in Mathematics and Physics. That same year, he received the Carlson R. Chambliss Academic Achievement Award from Kutztown University. He continued his studies at Rice University, where he obtained an M.A. in Philosophy in 2011 and a Ph.D. in Philosophy in 2015. Following his doctoral work, Barkasi served as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. He delivered a guest talk to the Philosophy Club there titled "Does your Brain See Everything You Do." His early academic career also included teaching positions in philosophy, reflecting his expertise in the discipline.

Barkasi's research bridges philosophy and neuroscience, focusing on perception, memory, consciousness, and auditory processing. His philosophical work examines the integration of memory into perception, the phenomenology of episodic memory, hallucinations as experiences of the past, sensorimotor enactivism and dreams, and neural correlates of consciousness. Notable publications include "What should the sensorimotor enactivist say about dreams?" in Philosophical Psychology (2021), "Some Hallucinations Are Experiences of the Past" in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (2020), and contributions to discussions on stable engrams and neural dynamics in Philosophy of Science (2022). In neuroscience, he has co-authored papers such as "Online reach adjustments induced by real-time movement sonification" in Journal of Neuroscience Methods (2024) and "Logistic regression for estimating functional effects with spatial transcriptomics." Barkasi has developed computational tools including the wispack package for spatial gene transcription modeling and the neurons package for neural circuit simulations. Subsequently, he held a Lecturer position in Philosophy and the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis, a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Network for Sensory Research, University of Toronto (2018-2020), and a Postdoctoral position in the Harris Multisensory Integration Lab at York University (2023). He currently serves as Staff Scientist in the Oviedo Lab, Department of Neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis, investigating speech processing in auditory cortex and related mechanisms.