Dr Mitchell Riley

Dr Mitchell Riley is a research fellow who leads research to understand the neural mechanisms behind cognition and decision making. He is focused on investigating how structures in the thalamus underlie a link between sensory information transfer and the use of that information to make perceptual decisions.   

He received a PhD from Wake Forest University’s School of Medicine in Neuroscience while investigating the functional anatomical axes along the primate prefrontal cortex, the changes in those axes as a result of training in working memory tasks, and the gradual spectrum of how those changes occur in the prefrontal cortex. Following his time at Wake Forest, he then undertook postdoctoral training at Vanderbilt University where he began work to investigate how the role of contextual settings impacted learning and memory in the primate hippocampus. He then returned to Wake Forest to take part in a project that investigated the use of a highly developed transcranial focused ultrasound stimulator in primate frontal eye fields as well as a project that utilised electrical stimulation in human hippocampus to improve memory recall of specific objects.  

Dr Riley is an author on 12 publications in print, leading 8 of those publications as either first author or co-first author. He received both an individual predoctoral training grant from the National Institute of Mental Health and was included on an intuitional training grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in the United States. He led student-organised committees for awards, research presentations, and graduate student wellness while at Wake Forest and emphasises mental health care for all professionals.