Official Story
Liz earned her BA in Psychology and Philosophy from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1984, where she was also a 3-time All-American in the Heptathalon. She chose Princeton for graduate school in Cognitive Psychology, but the summer prior to graduate school she got an internship to study brain-injured patients, which inspired her to also study neuroscience. This internship was arranged by the late George Miller, who is credited with founding the field of Cognitive Science, and later with Mike Gazzaniga, the field of Cognitive Neuroscience. At Princeton, Liz studied memory in amnesic patients with Bill Hirst and Marcia Johnson, combining her interests in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. After graduating in 1989, she did a post-doctoral fellowship with Mike Gazzaniga at Dartmouth, followed by one with Joe LeDoux at NYU, which marked the beginning of her studies of emotion and memory. In 1992, Liz accepted a position as an Assistant Professor at Yale University, and in 1999 she returned to NYU as an Associate Professor of Psychology. Today, Liz is the Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU.
Unofficial Story
Although both of Liz's parents are scientists, Liz was never really interested in science growing up and thought her parents were geeks (they are!). Liz was very athletic and also pretty social when she was young, and when it came time to pick a college she did not give it much thought and decided to follow her then-boyfriend to Ohio Wesleyan. Not knowing what she wanted to do, she stumbled into a philosophy class and found she really enjoyed thinking about philosophical questions, such as nature of knowledge or free will, but she was always frustrated when class was over because there were never any answers, only more questions! She also took psychology and found that some of questions were the same, but psychologists did research and tried to find answers. Liz then had to admit to her geeky parents that she, too, may be a scientist. Liz went to Princeton to study memory in amnesic patients with Bill Hirst. During graduate school, Liz travelled thousands of miles testing amnesic patients in their homes, both to make it easier for them and also because they would often forget to show up for appointments. After her second year in graduate school, Liz'''s advisor did not get tenure and left. Around the same time, Marcia Johnson joined the Princeton faculty, so Liz continued in her lab for a year, until she left for a sabbatical. Her fourth year of graduate school, Liz moved to NYC where Bill Hirst was a now faculty member at the New School. She finished her PhD in New York, occasionally commuting to Princeton. Being somewhat social, Liz loved living in NYC, so when Mike Gazzaniga offered her a post-doc at Dartmouth, she was wary about moving to such a small town. Mike told her she should try it for 6 months and if she hated it she could leave. And she did, even though she loved working with Mike. She didn't have a job and came back to NYC, where Bill Hirst let her hang out in his lab and pretend she had a job, and Mike let her continue some projects from afar. She occasionally did temp work to make money. Around this time, the James S. McDonnell Foundation offered fellowships to allow young scholars cross-training in the sub-disciplines that make up cognitive neuroscience. Liz applied for one to work with Joe LeDoux and get more training in neuroscience, in hopes of studying the amygdala and emotional memory in humans. She got it on her second try. Liz, however, was completely naïve about how hard it was to study the human amygdala before fMRI and did not have any success while in Joe's lab, although she did take all the first-year graduate neuroscience classes and learned a lot. After a year in Joe's lab, Liz took the job at Yale where she finally had the resources she needed to study the human amygdala and she was able to make her collaboration with Joe a success that has continued to this day.