Anna Garr is a Ph.D. candidate at McGill University in the Integrated Program of Neuroscience (IPN). Under the supervision of Ian Gold, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy & Psychiatry (Department of Philosophy, McGill), and in collaboration with Jim Engle-Warnick, Associate Dean (Faulty of Arts, McGill), Associate Professor (Department of Economics, McGill), & Vice-President of Experimental Economics (CIRANO), she is investigating normative definitions of morality, specifically the moral decision-making of criminal psychopaths.
Anna recently received a M.Sc. in Neuroscience in McGill’s IPN program in the Department of Neurology & Neurosurgery. Under the supervision of Lesley Fellows, M.D. Ph.D., Anna investigated, using traditional neuroeconomic paradigms, how patients with damage to the ventromedial frontal lobes make decisions.
Prior to her M.Sc. degree, Anna graduated with a B.S. in Cognitive Psychology from Belmont University, Nashville, TN. Through the guidance of her Honors supervisor, Ronnie Littlejohn, Chair of Philosophy (Belmont), Anna became a SURE research fellow under the mentorship of Frans De Waal, Director of Yerkes National Primate Research Center & C.H. Candler Professor of Primate Behavior (Emory University). There she began to question what defines humanity and whether it is material achievement, or alternatively, moral development which characterizes humans as a superior species.
After graduation, Anna developed research skills in the neuroscientific investigation of decision-making as an assistant in Jeffrey Schall’s, Director of Vanderbilt Vision Research Center and Center for Integrative & Cognitive Neuroscience (Vanderbilt University), primate research laboratory. Under the supervision of Dr. Schall and in association with the MacArthur Foundation in Law and Neuroscience, she continued to explore the development and normative definitions of human behavior and morality.