Aaron Schurger

Aaron Schurger completed his undergraduate studies in computer science at Indiana University and then worked as a software consultant before going on to earn his PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University under the guidance of Jonathan D. Cohen and Anne Treisman. After that he joined the research team of Stanislas Dehaene at the NeuroSpin research center as a post-doc, and then was a senior researcher working with Olaf Blanke and José del R Millán at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. He subsequently worked as a Principal Investigator (“chargé de recherche 1”) with the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM), based at the NeuroSpin research center near Paris, France, with ERC funding. In 2019 Schurger joined the faculty of the Department of Psychology at Chapman University in Southern California, where he is currently Associate Professor. Schurger's research focuses on the neural signatures of subjective experience and the neural antecedents of self-initiated movement. In 2013 Schurger was awarded the William James Prize from the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) and was also awarded the BMI-Kaloy prize from the Kaloy Foundation for his 2012 work on the influence of spontaneous fluctuations in brain activity on self-initiated movement. Schurger’s work on conscious perception has focused on how the formation of stable patterns of brain activity might play a role in consolidating and transmitting neural information and might serve as a signature of conscious perception. Schurger uses a variety of techniques in his research including behavioral psychophysics, neuroimaging, computational modeling, machine learning, and brain-computer interfaces.