Dora E. Angelaki
Neuroscientist
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Through Decision-making, Electrical engineering and Orientation (geometry)
Early life and education
Angelaki grew up in Crete. She studied electrical engineering at the National Technical University of Athens. During her undergraduate studies Angelaki became interested in biomedical engineering, and started to read biology papers alongside her degree. She moved to the University of Minnesota for her graduate studies and earned her PhD in biomedical engineering in 1991. Here she worked on fluid-filled passages in the inner ear, known as the vestibular system, which controls our spatial orientation and maintains our posture. Angelaki was made a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas Medical Branch. She completed another postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Zurich, where she worked with Volker Henn and Bernhard Hess. At Zurich Angelaki studied otolith afferents.
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Research and career
Angelaki was made an Assistant Professor at the University of Mississippi in 1993. She has investigated the sensory structures of the vestibular system. While at Mississippi Angelaki was awarded a grant to study the three-dimensional organisation of the oculomotor nerve. She moved to Washington University in St. Louis in 1999, where she was made an in Endowed Chair of Neurobiology 2003. In 2011 Angelaki was made the Wilhelmina Robertson Professor and Chair in the Department of Neuroscience at the Baylor College of Medicine. She holds a joint position at Rice University.
She investigates the communication between cells in the brain. She was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 1996. She studies computational, cognitive and systems neurosciences. She is interested in spatial orientation and navigation in humans and primates. She combines behavioural analysis with multi-electrode recording, laminar probes and microsimulation. Angelaki looks at how cognitive behaviour is produced in neuronal populations. She identified how the brain integrates information from the rotation and linear movement of the head with its response to gravity. Angelaki has investigated the changes in neural computation in people with autism. She showed that people with autism often have imbalances in the balance of neural excitation to neural inhibition, known as divisive normalisation. In 2013 Angelaki was made editor-in-chief of The Journal of Neuroscience.
Angelaki joined the New York University Tandon School of Engineering where she investigates the differences between human brains and artificial intelligence.
Personal life
Angelaki is married to J. David Dickman, a neurobiologist at the Baylor College of Medicine. They have two daughters.