Read Montague, the Virginia Tech Carilion Vernon Mountcastle Research Professor, was invited to speak at the eighth annual conference of the Cognitive Science Student Association at the University of California at Berkeley. He presented the keynote address on April 30, setting the tone for this year’s conference theme, “Decision Making.”

The Cognitive Science Student Association used the 2016 conference to serve as a stage on which cognitive scientists and students could consider the process of decision-making through of a variety of lenses, including psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, and philosophy.

In his research, Montague brings together multiple disciplines to better understand the neural underpinnings of human decision-making, social cognition, and willful choice in both health and disease. Montague oversees multiple research teams studying the neurobiology of these cognitive tasks as the director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and the Computational Psychiatry Unit at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. He is also professor of physics in the College of Science at Virginia Tech.