Mariam Aly
Mariam Aly has been a bookworm for as long as she can remember, and can trace her passion for science to the discovery of visual illusions in science books when she was a kid. Her interests in science were wide-ranging but she was most fascinated by perception, memory, and the brain. In her first year of college, she discovered that psychology was the science that allowed you to experimentally investigate the way we see and remember — and the rest is history. Aly is very grateful to now be a professor of psychology in Columbia University, where she spends her days thinking about, researching, and teaching cognitive neuroscience: the study of how the brain supports the way we think.