Audrey Duarte

Dr. Duarte is excited to join the Department of Psychology at U.T. Austin starting in Fall, 2021 after 13 years as a professor at The Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Duarte received her Ph.D. in Neurobiology from U.C. Berkeley in 2004 and conducted her postdoctoral work in cognitive neuroscience at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, UK. Dr. Duarte is a cognitive neuroscientist who uses multiple, complementary neuroscience methods including electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and neuropsychological methods (i.e. neurological patients), to understand the neural mechanisms of age-related changes in episodic memory, which is memory for personally experienced events. The major aim of her research program is to understand the neural changes that underlie age-related decline in episodic memory, why some people age better, from a neural and cognitive perspective, than others, and to develop and implement effective interventions to alleviate this decline. She has longstanding and active interdisciplinary collaborations with neurologists, neuropsychologists, and sleep disorder clinicians, and with mechanical engineers, to investigate experimental manipulations that may ameliorate episodic memory impairments in people with Alzheimer’s disease pathology, and to explore sleep-related biomarkers of Alzheimer’s pathology. She has a particular interest in the cognitive neuroscience of aging in racial/ethnic minorities and the psychosocial factors like race-related stress, depression, and acculturation that influence memory and underlying brain function in diverse populations. Her lab's work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Science Daily, and Ozy.