Rate My Professor Rebecca Lawson

Professor Rebecca Lawson is Professor of Neuroscience and Computational Psychiatry in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. She obtained a first-class honours degree in Psychology and Philosophy from the University of Glasgow (2002-2006) and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Cambridge (2006-2010), supervised by the late Dr. Andrew Calder, investigating adaptive gain control mechanisms and top-down processing in social cognition. Lawson serves as Senior Affiliated Scientist at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Royal Society Wellcome Trust Sir Henry Dale Fellow, Fellow in Psychological and Behavioural Sciences at Clare College, Bye-Fellow at Peterhouse College, and Deputy Head of School for Research Strategy in the School of the Biological Sciences. As Principal Investigator of the Prediction and Learning Lab, her research uses computational models, pharmacology, and brain imaging to examine how humans learn to build adaptive expectations about the world, other people, and themselves. This work investigates the neural realization of predictions, their development in infants, and their contributions to individual differences in neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric conditions, including autism, anxiety, and depression.