Rate My Professor Alexandra Cohen

Alexandra Cohen, also known as Ali Ochoa Cohen, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Emory University, a position she has held since 2022. She concurrently serves as Core Faculty in the Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology Program and Faculty Affiliate in the Center for Mind, Brain, & Culture. Cohen earned a B.S. in Neuroscience, magna cum laude with distinction and a minor in Psychology, from Duke University in 2012. She obtained her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences in 2017, followed by postdoctoral training in the Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science at New York University from 2017 to 2022.

Cohen's research investigates the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying how motivationally salient learning experiences shape lasting memories across development, situated at the intersection of affective, computational, and developmental cognitive neuroscience. Insights are drawn from behavioral neuroscience in non-human animals. As director of the Learning, Understanding, Memory, & Neurodevelopment (LUMeN) Lab, her studies explore how reward states in laboratory and real-world settings modulate memory formation to guide future behaviors from childhood through adulthood. She employs multimodal methods including behavioral paradigms, neuroimaging, psychophysiology, and computational modeling to examine emotional influences on memory and the impact of learning environment complexity on motivated learning, memory, and brain function across ages. This work aims to inform strategies leveraging developmental changes in motivated learning and memory to enhance learning, decision-making, and outcomes for young people. Cohen teaches PSYC 207: Brain and Behavior and PSYC 770R: Cognitive Science & Society. She has garnered awards such as the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2014), National Science Foundation SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2017), Laney Graduate School Mentor Fellow (2024), Society for Neuroscience Trainee Professional Development Award (2021), and election to the Memory Disorders Research Society (2022). With 32 publications, notable works include "Reward enhances memory via age-varying online and offline neural mechanisms across development" (Journal of Neuroscience, 2022), "Interactive development of adaptive learning and memory" (Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, 2021), "More than just a phase: adolescence as a window into how the brain generates behavior" (Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2025), and "Neural Representations of Reward-Related Memories Shift across Development" (Journal of Neuroscience, 2026).