Dr. Jana Schaich Borg uses neuroscience, computational modeling, and emerging technologies to study how we make social decisions that influence, or that are influenced by, other people.  As a neuroscientist, she employs neuroimaging, ECOG, simultaneous electrophysiological recordings in rats, and 3-D videos to gain insight into how humans and rodents make social decisions.  As a data scientist, she works on interdisciplinary teams to develop new statistical approaches to analyze these high-dimensional multi-modal data in order to uncover principles of how the brain integrates complex social information with internal representations of value to motivate social actions.

Dr. Schaich Borg’s current research projects include developing a Moral Artificial Intelligence, mapping the oscillatory networks that lead rats to help other rats, modeling neuroimaging data to determine the neural mechanisms that underlie psychopath’s predispositions to harm others, and developing “social synchrony” and machine vision algorithms for automated measures of empathy.  Issues related to these research projects have led her become involved in efforts to develop ethical guidelines for AI development and data sharing, as well as passionate about initiatives to use storytelling and data visualization to communicate the impact of complex analytical problems to diverse audiences.