John McGann

Dr. John McGann is the Director of the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science and a tenured Professor of Behavioral & Systems Neuroscience in the Psychology Department at Rutgers. He runs the McGann Laboratory on the Neurobiology of Sensory Cognition, which uses the olfactory system of humans and rodent models to explore how organisms learn about and interpret their sensory world. His peer-reviewed scientific work has been published in prominent journals, including Science, Neuron, and the Journal of Neuroscience. Research in the McGannLab has been funded by grants from the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders, National Institute on Mental Health, and the National Science Foundation totaling $7.6 million to date. Dr. McGann is the previous Chair of the National Institutes of Health’s Communication Disorders Review Committee, which reviews applications for federal research grants. His 2017 paper in the journal Science arguing that the human sense of smell is excellent and impactful was downloaded 5000 times in the first month and featured in Discover Magazine’s Top 100 discoveries. Dr. McGann regularly lectures to academic and lay audiences around the world and makes frequent media appearances. He also teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in neuroscience, psychology, statistics, and cognitive science.

Education: Dr. McGann received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Psychology from Yale University in 1998, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in Neuroscience, also from Yale, in 2003. He completed his postdoctoral research training at Boston University from 2003-2009 and has been a Professor at Rutgers since 2009.