Rate My Professor Reza Habib

Reza Habib serves as Director of the School of Psychological and Behavioral Sciences and Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Toronto in 2000, where he also earned his M.A. in 1994 and B.S. in 1993, conducting doctoral research under Dr. Endel Tulving. Following his doctorate, Habib completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto. He joined Southern Illinois University as Assistant Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences in the Department of Psychology in fall 2003, promoted to Associate Professor in 2009. Since 2012, he has directed the undergraduate program in the department. His career includes prior roles as instructor and teaching assistant at the University of Toronto from 1993 to 1997.

Habib's research focuses on functional neuroimaging of long-term learning and memory, examining medial temporal lobe roles in novelty detection, neural correlates of memory availability and accessibility, metamemory, the default network as influenced by APOE genotype, and parietal cortex involvement in encoding and retrieval. Additional specializations encompass successful aging predictors and neural mechanisms of pathological gambling. He directs the Habib Cognition Lab, investigating episodic memory, impulsivity, self-control, probability estimation in risk, and problem gambling, with projects developing tools like the BetWell mobile app for healthier sports betting and OpenEMA for ecological momentary assessment. Key publications include 'Neurobehavioral Evidence for the “Near-Miss” Effect in Pathological Gamblers' (Habib & Dixon, 2010, Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior), 'Consciousness of subjective time in the brain' (Nyberg et al., 2010, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), 'Activation of midbrain structures by associative novelty and the formation of explicit memory in humans' (Schott et al., 2004, Learning & Memory), and influential earlier works such as 'Novelty and familiarity activations in PET studies of memory encoding and retrieval' (1996). Habib has presented invited colloquia at institutions including Northwestern University, Washington University, Stockholm University, and international conferences like the XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience. He chairs the departmental Undergraduate Curriculum and Graduate Admissions Committees and serves on university committees including the Graduate Council, CoLA Council, and Campus Wide Assessment Committee. He guest-edited a special issue on episodic memory and the brain for Neuropsychologia in 2009.