Rate My Professor Yale Cohen

Yale E. Cohen is the Gabriel Tucker Professor II of Otorhinolaryngology: Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine. He holds secondary appointments as Professor of Bioengineering, Professor of Neuroscience, and Professor of Psychology. Cohen earned a BSE in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1988, an MSE in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1990, and a PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. His research examines how the brain combines sensory, motor, and cognitive cues to form internal computational models of the external world. Specifically, his program focuses on the representation of auditory information in the cortex, how auditory information is integrated with cognitive processes such as attention, decision making, motor planning, or memory, and how auditory and visual information is combined to form unified sensory percepts. The Cohen Lab uses neurophysiological, behavioral, psychophysical, and computational methods and integrates trainees from physicists, clinicians, engineers, and psychologists, having hosted over 20 undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral researchers in the past five years.

In administrative capacities, Cohen serves as Director of the Hearing Sciences Center, Chair of the Bioengineering Graduate Group, Chair of the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) coordinating regulatory compliance for more than 500 investigators, 1600 protocols, and 110,000 animals, Associate Dean for Research Infrastructure and Strategy at the Perelman School of Medicine, and Director of the Office of Animal Welfare. He previously acted as Curriculum Director of the Neuroscience Graduate Group from 2012 to 2013 and was appointed Assistant Dean of Research Facilities and Resources in 2022. Cohen received the 2020 Penn Medicine Jane M. Glick Graduate Student Teaching Award for excellence in academic mentoring. Key publications include Sheth J et al., "The interplay of uncertainty, relevance and learning influences auditory categorization" (Scientific Reports, 2024); Collina JS et al., "Individual-specific strategies inform category learning" (Scientific Reports, 2024); Banno T et al., "Changes in neural readout of response magnitude during auditory streaming do not correlate with behavioral choice in the auditory cortex" (Cell Reports, 2023); DiTullio RW et al., "Time as a supervisor: temporal regularity and auditory object learning" (Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 2023); and Lestang JH et al., "Functional network properties of the auditory cortex" (Hearing Research, 2023).