Official Story
Erin Rich is an Associate Professor in the Center for Neural Science at NYU. She earned her undergraduate degree from Tufts University, and MD and PhD in Neuroscience as part of the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Her doctoral thesis focused on the role of rodent frontal cortex in behavioral strategies. She then did postdoctoral research with Joni Wallis at UC Berkeley, studying reward and decision-making in the non-human primate prefrontal cortex. In 2017, she returned to Mount Sinai to start her independent lab, focusing on the neural basis of cognition and decision-making in non-human primates, and in January 2025, she joined the faculty at NYU. Throughout her career, Erin has been supported by multiple funding sources, including an NRSA predoctoral award (F30), a Mentored Clinical Scientist Research Development Award (K08), as well as independent investigator grants from the NIH. She was awarded the Hilda and Preston Davis Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, a NARSAD Young Investigator Grant from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, a Whitehall Foundation Research Grant, and named a Pew Scholar in Biomedical Sciences in 2018. In addition to her research, Erin is a Reviewing Editor at the Journal of Neuroscience, and an organizer of several conferences, including the Neurobiology of Cognition GRC and Computational Properties of Prefrontal Cortex (CPPC).
Unofficial Story
I grew up in a small town in the far reaches of northern New York, in a part of the state that has been in a continuous post-industrial decline. Locals call it the North Country. My mom’s family has been there for generations, but I had no interest in staying. When I found a program where I could do my senior year of high school at an engineering college nearby, I jumped on it. It was only 40 minutes from home but it felt like another planet where there were suddenly opportunities. These only expanded when I moved to Tufts the next year. I tried a lot of different directions, some stuck and some didn’t. I was interested in Biology and intrigued by courses with big titles like Endocrinology and Immunology. I didn’t really know what these were, but I tried them anyway, and one ended with an opportunity to do summer research in the professor’s lab. I stayed in Michael Romero’s lab for three years, working summers for a small stipend and semesters for course credit. He taught me the basics of doing research. Not just procedures, but principles of how to think scientifically and how to approach experiments. The lab was in a windowless basement but it was my favorite place on campus.
So why did I go to medical school? In hind-sight, the main reason was because I could. One of the things about leaving a small, isolated town and landing – with the help of scholarships and Pell grants – at a fancy New England university is that it encouraged a nagging feeling that I needed to prove myself. What’s more ambitious than a graduate degree? How about two. Medical school taught me a lot about the profession, human biology, and human nature. But I also learned that I did not especially enjoy the practice of medicine. Research, on the other hand, became my passion. I joined Matthew Shapiro’s lab, drawn by his larger-than-life ideas and enthusiasm. Of course, many of those didn’t translate to good experiments, and the stumbles were unnerving. But Matthew taught me to think broadly and creatively at a time when I had a tendency to be a little too goal-oriented. He let me try things and fail, then figure out how to regroup and carry on.
As I was completing the MSTP, after years of sampling this and that, I finally knew that I wanted to try for the elusive academic research position. Most people advised me to at least do a residency. Some said it would be a waste of the government’s investment in training me if I didn’t. But I’m stubborn enough not to listen and moved to Berkeley to work with Joni Wallis. She taught me the practical skills of primate neurophysiology and the soft skills of navigating a career in academia. The experiments are long and hard, and it took three years to find out that my first one didn’t produce the expected results. It was devastating and disorienting, and I was sure it meant I wouldn’t get the job that I’d aimed for. So, I started implementing my back-up plan and took an adjunct position teaching night classes at Cal State to burnish my teaching resume. After a few more fits and starts, though, my second experiment was better and earned a K award and a few job interviews. Eventually I was able to return to New York, as I wanted to do from the minute I left. I did the soft-money gig for long enough to understand the pluses and minuses, and now I’m trying my hand at being a university professor.