Rate My Professor Marta Garrido

Professor Marta Garrido is a Professor in the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She leads the Cognitive Neuroscience and Computational Psychiatry Laboratory and serves as Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Hub. Additionally, she holds the position of Research Program Lead at the Graeme Clark Institute for Biomedical Engineering and is Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Integrative Brain Function. Her research utilizes brain imaging techniques combined with computational modelling to explore how the brain learns from experience and makes decisions, with a focus on both typical individuals and those with psychiatric conditions.

Garrido initially trained in Engineering Physics at the University of Lisbon before obtaining her PhD in Neuroscience from University College London in 2008, supervised by Professor Karl Friston. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California, Los Angeles, and University College London. In 2013, she joined the Queensland Brain Institute on an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, where she established her independent laboratory. The lab relocated to the University of Melbourne in mid-2019. Her contributions to the field have been recognized with several prestigious awards, including the 2020 Paxinos-Watson Prize from the Australasian Neuroscience Society, the 2019 Aubrey Lewis Award from Biological Psychiatry Australia, and the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. She has previously chaired the Organisation for Human Brain Mapping Australian Chapter and advocates for Open Science practices. In 2024, she received $1.3 million funding from the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation for research into the perceptual experiences of people with psychosis. More recently, she joined the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Biotechnology as a Chief Investigator.