Zoe Kourtzi

Zoe Kourtzi is a Fellow at the University of Cambridge, affiliated with the School of Biological Sciences and the Department of Psychology. Her research focuses on cognitive computational neuroscience, with an emphasis on AI-guided solutions for neurodegenerative and mental health disorders, lifelong learning, brain plasticity, and predictive modelling. She employs techniques such as neuroimaging, brain stimulation, and computational modelling to explore individualised trajectories of brain health and disease. Her work bridges experimental neuroscience and computational theory to advance understanding of cognitive flexibility and brain-inspired AI.

Zoe Kourtzi's research focuses on understanding the neural mechanisms underlying object recognition and shape perception in the human visual cortex. Her work explores how the lateral occipital complex and other brain regions process object shape, motion, and depth cues to form coherent visual percepts. She investigates the integration of local features into global shapes, the role of neural plasticity in shape learning, and the neural basis of perceptual organization. Her studies also examine how the brain represents dynamic stimuli, such as implied motion and binocular disparities, and how these representations influence behavior and decision-making.