Picture of David Badre next to a bookcase.

David Badre

George A. and Helen Dunham Cowan Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Director of the Neuroscience Institute

Contact

Biography

David Badre is the George A. and Helen Dunham Cowan Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Director of the Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon University in 2026, he was Professor and Chair of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences at Brown University, where he was on the faculty for 17 years and was also a member of the Carney Institute for Brain Science. Badre received his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and did a postdoctoral fellowship at University of California, Berkeley, before joining Brown as faculty in 2008.

Dr. Badre’s research focuses on the neuroscience of cognitive control, which concerns how we set goals and then plan and monitor actions to reach them. In over two and a half decades of published work, Badre has made several fundamental contributions to our understanding of the cognitive, computational and neural mechanisms that underlie flexible and intelligent behavior. His research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Eye Institute, National Institute on Aging, the Office of Naval Research, and several foundations. His scientific contributions have been recognized by numerous honorific awards, including from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He has been elected a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Cognitive Science Society. He served as Chair of the Cognition and Perception and Human Complex Mental Function Panels at NIH, and has Co-Chaired the NIH Director's New Innovator Award (DP2) Editorial Board. His 2020 book, On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done, on the neuroscience of cognitive control, was a Finalist for the Prose Award in in Popular Science and Mathematics from the Association of American Publishers. His forthcoming book on the neuroscience of human error will be published by Princeton University Press.