Cynthia F. Moss
American neuroscientist
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Early life and education
Born in Columbus, Ohio, Moss is the daughter of Howard A. Moss and Adrienne H. Moss. She grew up in Rockville, Maryland, and had the opportunity to live for one year in Florence, Italy and one year in Linköping, Sweden during her teenage years. Her brother Randolph Moss is a judge in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Her brother Eric Moss is Senior Vice President, Deputy General Counsel & Chief Compliance Officer of the Bank of Montreal.
Moss graduated with a B.S. (Summa cum laude) from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and earned a Ph.D. from Brown University. After earning her graduate degree, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and later a Research Fellow at Brown University.
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Research and career
In 1989 Moss joined the faculty of Harvard University as an assistant professor. She became the Morris Kahn Associate Professor in 1994.
Moss accepted a professorship in 1995 at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP), in the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Systems Research. During her tenure at UMCP, she was Director of the interdepartmental graduate program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science. She was named a professor emerita UMCP .
In 2014, Moss joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins University as Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences. She holds appointments in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Whiting School of Engineering, and the School of Medicine.
Moss's research seeks to understand the brain's representation of dynamic sensory information in the natural environment. Her research program uses the active sensing system of echolocating bats, gaining access to the sensory information these animals use to guide their behaviors.
Echolocating bats produce high frequency sounds and extract information carried by echo returns to guide natural behaviors. Moss's lab group pioneered the use of synchronized high-speed video and microphone array recordings to quantify the bat's coordinated echolocation and flight behavior during target tracking and discrimination, obstacle avoidance, social interactions, and navigation.
Moss's research uses modern neuroscience tools to discover mechanisms of auditory scene analysis, spatial memory and navigation, representing stimulus space and orienting behaviors, sensorimotor transformations, object distance perception and tactile sensing.