CIFAR Co-director and Koerner Fellow Adrian Owen (Western University) and CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar Megan Peters (University of California, Irvine), both members of CIFAR’s Brain, Mind & Consciousness program, discuss the optimal conditions for our brains. How much sleep do we need, what can COVID-19 do to the brain, and how has the pandemic changed neuroscience?
Adrian Owen OBE is a co-director and the Koerner Fellow in CIFAR’s Brain, Mind & Consciousness program and a professor at Western University in London, Ontario. He is best known for his work assessing consciousness of patients in vegetative states, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) technology to observe their brain activity.
Megan Peters is a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar in the Brain, Mind & Consciousness program and an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine. She draws on insights and approaches from cognitive science, psychology, computational neuroscience, and philosophy to understand how brains process and evaluate sensory information. She is the chair of the Neuromatch Academy, an online summer school for computational neuroscientists started during the COVID-19 pandemic.