Anna Wang Roe


Anna Wang Roe is an American neuroscientist, the director of the Interdisciplinary Institute of Neuroscience and Technology at the Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China and part-time professor of neuroscience at the Oregon National Primate Research Center at the Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, Oregon. She is known for her studies on the functional organization and connectivity of cerebral cortex and for bringing interdisciplinary approaches to address questions in systems neuroscience.

Career

Anna Wang Roe obtained her B.A. cum laude from Harvard University in 1984, majoring in biochemistry with special field of interest in neurobiology. Further, she was awarded Ph.D. in Neuroscience from MIT in 1991, under the supervision of Mriganka Sur. During her doctoral studies, she developed an experimental paradigm known as the 'rewired ferret' for studying the development and plasticity of the brain. After obtaining Ph.D., she went on to undertake post-doctoral training with Dr. Torsten Wiesel and Dr. Daniel Y Ts'o at Baylor College of Medicine, where she studied the functional organization of the primary and secondary visual cortical areas of the primate brain using Intrinsic Signal Optical Imaging. In 1996, as a visiting scholar at University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, she studied the visual system of marmosets and flying foxes.
Roe returned to the United States in 1996 where she started her first faculty position as an assistant professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Yale School of Medicine. Her laboratory moved to Vanderbilt University in 2003, where she worked as a professor Psychology, Radiology, and Biomedical Engineering until 2015. At Vanderbilt, her research was primarily on the visual and somatosensory system of primates. From 2016, Roe was appointed as a professor of Neuroscience at the Oregon National Primate Research Center at the Oregon Health & Science University.
In 2013, Roe founded the 'Interdisciplinary Institute for Neuroscience and Technology ' at the Zhejiang University, which focuses on fundamental research in the fields of cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, and neurotechnology. She is the founding director of ZIINT, and of Zhejiang University-Siemens Joint Brain Imaging Research Center, and she also holds a professorship in the Zhejiang University School of Medicine and Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Roe also serves as the associate editor of scientific journals like Neurophotonics, NeuroImage, Trends in Neuroscience and Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience. She has previously held memberships in the SMI and IFCN of the NIH study sections and regularly conducts grant reviews for funding agencies in the US, Europe, Israel, and China. She also holds advisory roles for research and faculty development in the US and China.

Awards and honours