Jessie Yaros is a PhD candidate in neurobiology and behavior at UC Irvine, where she studies the neural correlates of facial recognition. Her research sits at the intersection of social and perceptual neuroscience, examining how the brain recognizes faces and how that process interacts with the social and perceptual aspects of race.

Jessie first became interested in neuroscience in high school, when she realized the field was the marriage of her two favorite subjects, biology and psychology. She has since spent a rewarding decade-plus learning about the brain, starting in UC San Diego’s Cognitive Science department. There she studied the mind through biological, anthropological, philosophical, and computational perspectives, an interdisciplinary training that primed her current research and continues to shape how she approaches questions about perception and social cognition.