Uma Karmarkar received an Early Career Award from the Society of Neuroeconomics for her outstanding research using neuroscience to better understand decision-making.
“The Society for Neuroeconomics represents an exceptional interdisciplinary group of academics, and Iâm honored to receive this award,â Karmarkar said.
Karmarkar was one of two award winners selected by the committee to earn the prestigious honor. She and Molly Crockett of Yale University received $1000, as well as an engraved plaque that the recipients will receive at the Annual Meeting of the Society. The award was presented by the society president, Joseph Kable from the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.
In order to be eligible for the award, candidates must have a Ph.D. degree and be active members of the Society for NeuroEconomics. They also must not have more than seven yearsâ experience as a faculty member.
Karmarkar studies the neural and behavioral mechanisms underlying how people use information in the world around them to make decisions.
âMany âreal lifeâ choices involve a fair amount of uncertainty,â she said. âOne major direction of my current research involves untangling how we use favorable and unfavorable information in situations where we know our knowledge is incomplete.â
About Karmarkar
Before joining the Rady School, Karmarkar was an Assistant Professor in the Marketing Unit of the Harvard Business School, and spent a year as a visiting professor at the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley.
Karmarkar earned a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004, and a second Ph.D. in Consumer Behavior from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University in 2011. Prior to her doctoral work, she received a B.S. in Symbolic Systems (Neural Systems) from Stanford in 1998.
Karmarkar is also an assistant professor at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy.