Official Story
Anne Churchland received a PhD in Neuroscience from UCSF based on her work studying motion processing and eye movements in macaque monkeys. She worked under the supervision of Steve Lisberger. She was subsequently a postdoctoral fellow with Mike Shadlen, then at the University of Washington, studying decision-making in nonhuman primates. Next, she became an Assistant Professor at Cold Spring Harbor laboratory in New York, and started a research group focussing on multisensory decision-making in rodents. Her research in this topic has implicated both cortical and subcortical circuits in the computations that support these decisions. She also discovered that even the brains of expert decision-makers are often donated by signals unrelated to the decision at hand, such as idiosyncratic fidgets. She is now an Associate Professor and the Neuroscience Chair at Cold Spring Harbor. She has also co-organized many conferences including Cosyne and Canonical Computations in Brains and Machines and she is the founder of anneslist.net.
Unofficial Story
Anne grew up as the daughter of some philosophers which means people always ask her if she grew up having interesting dinner table conversations. In fact, she did! However these conversations did not make her particularly enthusiastic about science. She somewhat liked math as a teenager but really preferred canoeing in the wilderness. In college, she gained an interest in developmental psychology which is a totally awesome field and got Anne thinking about the brain. To pursue this passing interest, Anne became a technician after graduating college and worked in Steve Lisberger's lab at UCSF. She really liked running experiments and analyzing data, and found this almost as fun as going on canoe trips. It helped a lot that the people in the lab were nice, and would assist each other when they ran into difficulties. At the end of grad school, Anne had a baby and then had another baby 2 years later. Being a parent to 2 small children as a postdoc both ameliorated and exacerbated the many challenges Anne faced during that period [small children often have this dual effect on challenges]. After struggling for a long time on the job market, Anne got a job at Cold Spring Harbor and planned to study decision-making in rodents. At the time, this was quite a novel idea and most people laughed at Anne's plan to pursue it. Anne loved being a PI pretty much immediately. She really liked interacting with the people in her lab, and enjoyed hearing their ideas about the science. She also liked that she was able to create a lab culture in which people spoke critically about each other's ideas, but did it in a way that kept the conversation going. Anne would like to keep being a PI for a long time, albeit with a few canoe trips (and some interesting dinner conversations) sprinkled along the way.