Leslie Ungerleider

Who is Leslie Ungerleider?

Leslie Ungerleider is an experimental psychologist and neuroscientist, currently Chief of the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the National Institute of Mental Health. Ungerleider is known for introducing the concepts of the dorsal and ventral streams, two pathways of information processing in the brain that specialize in visuospatial processing and object recognition, respectively.

Ungerleider received a B.A. from Binghamton University and a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from New York University, and she completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Karl Pribram at Stanford University, where she began her work on higher-order perceptual mechanisms in the cortex of primates. In 1975 she moved to the National Institute of Mental Health, where she has remained since, initially joining Mortimer Mishkin in the Laboratory of Neuropsychology and establishing her own laboratory in 1995. In 2001, she was the recipient of the Women in Neuroscience Lifetime Achievement Award and in 2008 she became an NIH Distinguished Investigator. L. Ungerleider and M. Mishkin won the 2012 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology.