Profile
Prof Zoe KOURTZI
Principal Investigator and Director
Prof Zoe Kourtzi is a Professor of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. Her research aims to develop predictive models of neurodegenerative disease and mental health with translational impact in early diagnosis and personalised interventions. Kourtzi received her PhD from Rutgers University and was postdoctoral fellow at MIT and Harvard. She was a Senior Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and then a Chair in Brain Imaging at the University of Birmingham, before moving to the University of Cambridge in 2013. She is a Royal Society Industry Fellow, Fellow and Cambridge University Lead at the Alan Turing Institute, and the Scientific Director for Alzheimer's Research UK Initiative on Early Detection of Neurodegenerative Diseases (EDoN).
Cambridge
Researchers
CLIC
Research Interest
Prof Kourtzi's believes predicting individual socio-cognitive health is of high priority for health economies, given the translational potential for early diagnosis and personalised treatment. Yet, predicting intervention outcomes in health and society is challenged by variability across individuals. Her work addresses this challenge by developing predictive models based on machine learning approaches that synthesise large-scale multivariate and longitudinal data to characterise individualised profiles of health across the lifespan. This work has strong translational applications in education and healthcare for the design of:
a) practical cost-effective tools for early diagnosis of decline and disease progression in clinical practice
b) training programmes tailored to individual needs.
Key Publications
Google Scholar Link
Leong, Victoria, Kausar Raheel, Jia Yi Sim, Kriti Kacker, Vasilis M Karlaftis, Chrysoula Vassiliu, Kastoori Kalaivanan, et al. 2022. ‘A New Remote Guided Method for Supervised Web-Based Cognitive Testing to Ensure High-Quality Data: Development and Usability Study’. Journal of Medical Internet Research 24 (1): e28368. https://doi.org/10.2196/28368.
Tong, Ke. 2022. ‘Cognitive Flexibility and Its Association with Linguistic Preferences, Decision-Making, Tolerance of Uncertainty and Perceived Social Support’, April. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/AY9GR.
Kuai S, Levi D, Kourtzi Z (2013). Learning optimizes decision templates in the ventral visual cortex, Current Biology, 23, 1799-804.
Kuai S, Kourtzi Z (2013). Learning to see, but not discriminate visual forms is impaired in aging. Psychological Science, 24, 412-22.
Mayhew SD, Li S, Kourtzi Z (2012). Learning acts on distinct processes form visual form perception in the human brain. J Neuroscience, 32, 775-86.
Kourtzi Z, Connor E (2011). Neural representations for object perception: structure, category and adaptive coding. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 34, 45-67.
Zhang J, Kourtzi Z (2010). Learning-dependent plasticity with and without training in the human brain. PNAS, 107,13503-8.
Li S, Mayhew S D, Kourtzi Z (2009). Learning shapes the representation of behavioral choice in the human brain, Neuron, 62, 441-52.