Tirin Moore

Tirin Moore (born June 12, 1969) is an American neuroscientist who is a Professor of Neurobiology at Stanford University and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2020, he was selected by Cell as one of the Top 100 Black Scientists in America. He was elected Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.

Early life and education[]

Moore was born in Oakland, California.^[1] He was an undergraduate student at California State University, Chico. Moore was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship to join the laboratory of Charles Gross.^[2] He earned his doctoral degree at Princeton University, where he studied residual visual function after damage to the striate cortex.^[3] Moore moved to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for his postdoctoral research, where he worked alongside Peter H. Schiller.^[2] He studied the modulation of visual cortical signals.^[2] He eventually returned to Princeton, where he started studying selective visual attention.^[2]

Research and career[]

Moore was appointed to the faculty at Stanford University in 2003.^[1] He investigates the neural circuitry that underlie cognitive function. In particular, he studies how neural activity in the motor region of the prefrontal cortex influences visual representations in the brain.^[4] To achieve this, he studies the activity of large populations of single neurons in the visual structures of the brain, and how perturbing this activity impacts other brain structures.^[5]

Early in his tenure at Stanford, Moore identified that selective visual attention (i.e. the tendency of visual processing to be confined largely to stimuli that are relevant to behavior) could be causally linked to the neural mechanisms that underpin gaze. This allowed Moore to investigate the role of prefrontal dopamine in cognitive dysfunction.^[2] He found that dopamine transmission in the prefrontal cortex regulates the sensory processing in the posterior cortex.

Awards and honors[]

• 2005 American Physiological Society Alumni Achievement Award^[6]
• 2009 National Academy of Sciences Troland Award^[7]
• 2014 Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute^{[citation needed]}
• 2018 Elected to the National Academy of Medicine^[8]
• 2020 Top 100 Black Scientists in America^[9]
• 2021 National Academy of Sciences Pradel Research Award^[4]
• 2021 Elected to the National Academy of Sciences^[10]

Selected publications[]

• Tirin Moore; Katherine M Armstrong (1 January 2003). "Selective gating of visual signals by microstimulation of frontal cortex". Nature. 421 (6921): 370–373. doi:10.1038/NATURE01341. ISSN 1476-4687. PMID 12540901. Wikidata Q48403964.
• Tirin Moore; Mazyar Fallah (16 January 2001). "Control of eye movements and spatial attention". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 98 (3): 1273–1276. doi:10.1073/PNAS.021549498. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 14744. PMID 11158629. Wikidata Q34659730. (erratum)
• Mark M Churchland; Byron M Yu; John P Cunningham; et al. (21 February 2010). "Stimulus onset quenches neural variability: a widespread cortical phenomenon". Nature Neuroscience. 13 (3): 369–378. doi:10.1038/NN.2501. ISSN 1097-6256. PMC 2828350. PMID 20173745. Wikidata Q30493353.

References[]