Amritha Mallikarjun

I study how experience shapes perception, and how learners handle situations that differ from their training. My work spans species and senses, from humans to dogs and from hearing to smell. I received my PhD in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science at the University of Maryland, where I founded the Canine Language Perception Lab to investigate how dogs recognize words and pick out speech from background noise. As a postdoctoral researcher and senior research investigator at the Penn Vet Working Dog Center, I led research on olfaction and behavior, including training dogs to detect chronic wasting disease and validating measures of detection canine performance. I now work with Dr. Erin Hecht in structural and diffusion MRI to study how experience shapes the canine brain.