Draft:Megan A. K. Peters

Megan Amelia Knapp Peters is an American cognitive neuroscientist and computational neuroscientist and science communicator. Her work asks how the human brain can be responsible for creating or supporting subjective experience by investigating conscious versus unconscious perception, metacognition, and computational models. Her primary appointment is as Associate Professor in the University of California, Irvine's Department of Cognitive Sciences. She is also a Fellow in the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Brain, Mind, and Consciousness program and a Scialog Fellow in the Research Corporation for Science Advancement Molecular Basis of Cognition program. She is also known for her role as co-founder, President, and Chairperson of the Board of Directors at Neuromatch.

Career & Employment
Peters received her bachelor's degree in cognitive science from Brown University in 2006. Following one year spent teaching English in Japan through the JET Programme, she managed the University of Southern California Language Development Lab (PI: Toben Mintz) for two years. She subsequently earned a master's degree in computational cognitive neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2010, followed by a doctoral degree in the same in 2014. After working as a postdoc with Hakwan Lau, in 2017 she joined the faculty in the Bioengineering Department at the University of California, Riverside and then joined the UC Irvine faculty in 2020.

Research
Peters focuses on how the brain evaluates, represents, and uses uncertainty, including how it can perform adaptive computations based on noisy, incomplete information. Her research program covers of topics such as metacognition, introspective monitoring, perceptual decision-making and similar, tackled through a combination of behavioral experiments, noninvasive neuroimaging (such as fMRI), and computational models (largely Bayesian and Signal Detection Theoretic).

Open Science
After the COVID-19 pandemic shut down neuroscience summer schools and workshops worldwide in 2020, Peters co-founded Neuromatch, a non-profit organization focused on promoting equity in the sciences and advancing open science policies, alongside Konrad Kording, Paul Schrater, Sean Escola, Athena Akrami, Kate Bonnen, Carsen Stringer, Brad Wyble, and Gunnar Blohm. The project started with Neuromatch Conference and later expanded to Neuromatch Academy and the Neuromatch Open Publishing journal. As an organization, Neuromatch has quickly risen to the forefront of the open science and remote learning movements, enjoying extensive news coverage in the wake of both its success and its efforts to obtain special permission from the US Office of Foreign Assets Control to teach students from Iran. Since 2020, Neuromatch has hosted annual conferences and workshops as well as the live online academy.

In 2021, Neuromatch Academy added a deep learning course in addition to its original computational neuroscience course. In 2023, a climate science course was added. The program has taught approximately 20,000 students with the help of several hundred teaching assistants since 2020. Neuromatch Academy has also been the subject of several papers exploring the educational efficacy and accessibility of its program and has been written about in the Lancet among other outlets.

On September 27, 2022, Neuromatch posted an open letter to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy making a number of policy suggestions that it argued would promote equity and open access in scientific research. Over 1,000 academic professionals from 33 countries and 240 universities signed the letter, including Yann LeCun, Michael Eisen, Peter Murray-Rust, Peter Suber, Timothy Behrens, Daniel Wolpert, Chris Bourg, Ila Fiete, and more.

Peters has been recognized for her role in building Neuromatch in many instances, notably when Neuromatch won the Neuro Irv and Helga Cooper Foundation Open Science prize in 2022] and when Neuromatch won the BiasWatchNeuro Award for Equity and Inclusivity in 2020, specifically naming Peters by saying, "We specifically want to celebrate Megan Peters and highlight her leadership skills as President of NMA."