In a great loss for our department and community, Sarah DuBrow passed away on February 13th, 2022 at the age of 35 due to a highly aggressive form of cancer. Although a relatively new faculty member, Sarah's career was off to a phenomenal start. Within the field of cognitive neuroscience, Sarah was already widely regarded as a leader for her scholarship related to how the brain supports the perception, memory, and organization of events in time. She was particularly well known for her research on how boundaries between events shape the way people remember those events. Sarah's outstanding research contributions were reflected by numerous accolades including a Sloan Research Fellowship, an APS Rising Star Award, and her election to the Memory Disorders Research Society.
As a colleague, Sarah will be dearly missed. She was incredibly kind, thoughtful, and quick to smile. Sarah was known as a voracious reader, a lightning-quick thinker, and someone who was deeply curious about anything related to cognitive neuroscience. She also placed a great emphasis on inclusion, making people from any walk of life feel welcome and actively contributing to several professional and university communities to effect systemic change in issues of equity and inclusion. Sarah deeply valued her role as a mentor, as well, making outstanding contributions to graduate and undergraduate research. Her commitment to training the next generation of scientists was recognized by a Faculty Research Mentoring Award from the Center for Undergraduate Research and Engagement.
Sarah DuBrow, Ph.D., was an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Associate Member of the Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Oregon. She received her BA from Stanford University in 2008, her Ph.D. from New York University in 2016, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University in 2018. She is survived by her husband, Ben Hutchinson (also an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon), and their daughter.
Sarah's most recent research bio:
Why does our subjective experience of the world feel structured when, in fact, it is continuous? How do our internal and external states influence this structure? Research in the DuBrow lab seeks to understand how we learn the structure of our environments and how we use that structure to organize our memories and guide our decisions. Using neuroimaging methods, we investigate how neural representations can mirror the true structure of the external world, and, at the same time, distort that structure to achieve behavioral goals. By mapping between the brain and behavior, we hope to shed light on fundamental organizing principles in human cognition.
Selected Publications:
Shin, Y.S., & DuBrow, S. (2021). Structuring memory through inference-based event segmentation. Topics in Cognitive Science, 13(1), 106-127.
DuBrow, S., Eberts, E., & Murty, V. (2019). A common mechanism underlying choice's influence on preference and memory. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 26(6), 1958-1966.
Sols, I., DuBrow, S., Davachi, L., & Fuentemilla, L. (2017). Event boundaries trigger rapid memory replay of the prior event to promote their representation in long-term memory. Current Biology, 27(22), 3499-3504.
DuBrow, S., Rouhani, N., Niv, Y., & Norman, K.A. (2017). Does mental context drift or shift? Current Opinions in Behavioral Sciences, 17, 141-146.
DuBrow, S., & Davachi, L. (2016). Temporal binding within and across events. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 134, 107-114.
Murty, V., DuBrow, S., & Davachi, L. (2015). The simple act of choosing influences declarative memory. Journal of Neuroscience, 35(16), 6255-6264.
DuBrow, S., & Davachi, L. (2014). Temporal memory is shaped by encoding stability and intervening item reactivation. Journal of Neuroscience, 34(42), 13998-14005.
DuBrow, S., & Davachi, L. (2013). The influence of context boundaries on memory for the sequential order of events. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142(4), 1277-1286.