Kenneth T. Kishida

Kenneth T. Kishida is a Research Scientist in the Computational Psychiatry Unit at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. He investigates neurobiological processes underlying human choice behavior using computational approaches paired with measurements of behavior and associated neural activity. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Genetics at the University of California, Davis, but also studied Philosophy and developed an interest in investigating the biological basis of mental processes. During his doctoral work in the Department of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, he investigated molecular mechanisms supporting synaptic plasticity, learning, and memory in rodents. He continued during his post-doctoral years to use computational approaches to investigate human behavior and associated brain activity.

Currently, his experiments employ measurements of brain activity and behavior while human volunteers perform model-guided behavioral paradigms. These experiments are designed to expose how the brain encodes computations important for adaptive choice behavior and are beginning to reveal surprising ways that the human brain encodes this information.