Professor Kevin LaBar has accepted the invitation to serve as Associate Chair of the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience for a three-year term beginning July 1, 2021. He will serve alongside Professor Elizabeth Marsh who will concurrently begin her term as Department Chair. In a letter to colleagues, Dean Ashby shared: "We are grateful to Kevin for agreeing to take on this leadership role."
Dr. LaBar comes to the role of associate chair having served as the Associate Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (CCN), following his position as Co-director of the Undergraduate Studies in Neuroscience program. In addition to his primary appointment in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, LaBar maintains a secondary appointment in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Duke University Medical Center. He is a member of the DIBS Faculty Network, and an affiliate of the Duke-UNC Center for Brain Imaging and Analysis. LaBar also holds a lifetime distinction of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow.
LaBar's research focuses on understanding how emotional events modulate cognitive processes in the human brain. His lab, the LaBaratory, aims to identify brain regions that encode the emotional properties of sensory stimuli, and show how these regions interact with neural systems supporting social cognition, executive control, and learning and memory. LaBar's lab uses functional neuroimaging, psychophysiological, and behavioral methods in healthy adults and in patients with neuropsychiatric disorders.
Department of Psychology & Neuroscience
