Colin Camerer

Director, T&C Chen Center for Social and Decision Neuroscience

Colin Camerer is Caltech's Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics. He earned a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1981 and was at Northwestern University, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Chicago before joining the Caltech faculty in 1994. He was the past president of the Economic Science Association and the Society for Neuroeconomics, was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2013. He has published more than 180 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and authored or edited four books.

The Camerer group uses a wide variety of lab and field methods to study the computations that result in goal-directed human economic and social decisions, including strategic interactions and market trading. His group's functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) projects have isolated the basis of self-control when faced with tempting foods, emotional regulation in dealing with financial loss, how curiosity increases learning, and the neural circuitry underlying the life cycle of stock market bubbles. Their group has also used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to causally influence choice, eyetracking to measure attention, behavior of patients with brain lesions to understand altruism and fear.