Cynthia F. Moss

Cynthia F. Moss is an American neuroscientist and Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, with joint appointments in the Departments of Neuroscience and Mechanical Engineering. Moss is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Acoustical Society of America, and the International Society for Neuroethology. Her research focuses on the mechanisms of sensory-motor integration, scene perception, spatial attention, and spatial memory.

Cynthia F. Moss Professor
Born	Columbus, Ohio
Occupation(s)	Professor in Psychological and Brain Sciences, Neuroscience, and Mechanical Engineering
Spouse	Donald Berger
Children	Natalie Louise, Jackson Raymond and Peter Ethan
Parent(s)	Howard A. and Adrienne H. Moss
Academic background
Education	B.S., Summa cum laude University of Massachusetts Ph.D., Brown University
Alma mater	Brown University
Thesis	Hearing sensitivity and frequency selectivity in the green treefrog, Hyla cinerea (1986)
Doctoral advisor	Andrea Megela Simmons
Academic work
Discipline	Neuroscientist
Sub-discipline	Sensory information processing and adaptive motor control
Institutions	1987-1988: Research Fellow, Brown University 1989-1994: Assistant Professor, Harvard 1994-1995: Morris Kahn Associate Professor of Psychology, Harvard 1995-2014: Professor, University of Maryland Since 2014: Professor of Psychology, Johns Hopkins University

Early life and education

Born in Columbus, Ohio,^[1] Moss is the daughter of Howard A. Moss and Adrienne H. Moss. She grew up in Rockville, Maryland, and had the opportunity to live for one year in Florence, Italy and one year in Linköping, Sweden during her teenage years. Her brother Randolph Moss^[2] is a judge in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Her brother Eric Moss is Senior Vice President, Deputy General Counsel & Chief Compliance Officer of the Bank of Montreal.^[3]

Moss graduated with a B.S. (Summa cum laude) from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and earned a Ph.D. from Brown University.^[4] After earning her graduate degree, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and later a Research Fellow at Brown University.^[5]

Research and career

In 1989 Moss joined the faculty of Harvard University as an assistant professor. She became the Morris Kahn Associate Professor in 1994.^[6]

Moss accepted a professorship in 1995 at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP), in the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Systems Research. During her tenure at UMCP, she was Director of the interdepartmental graduate program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science.^[5] She was named a professor emerita UMCP .^[7]

In 2014, Moss joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins University as Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences.^[8] She holds appointments in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Whiting School of Engineering, and the School of Medicine.^[9]

Moss's research seeks to understand the brain's representation of dynamic sensory information in the natural environment. Her research program uses the active sensing system of echolocating bats, gaining access to the sensory information these animals use to guide their behaviors.^[10][11][12]

Echolocating bats produce high frequency sounds and extract information carried by echo returns to guide natural behaviors. Moss's lab group pioneered the use of synchronized high-speed video and microphone array recordings to quantify the bat's coordinated echolocation and flight behavior during target tracking and discrimination, obstacle avoidance, social interactions, and navigation.^[13][14]

Moss's research uses modern neuroscience tools to discover mechanisms of auditory scene analysis, spatial memory and navigation, representing stimulus space and orienting behaviors, sensorimotor transformations, object distance perception and tactile sensing.^[15][16]

Selected publications

Cynthia Moss with big brown bat

Articles

• Schnitzler, Hans-Ulrich; Moss, Cynthia F.; Denzinger, Annette (August 2003). "From spatial orientation to food acquisition in echolocating bats". Trends in Ecology & Evolution. 18 (8): 386–394. doi:10.1016/S0169-5347(03)00185-X.
• Surlykke, Annemarie (1 November 2000). "Echolocation behavior of big brown bats, Eptesicus fuscus, in the field and the laboratory". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 108 (5): 2419–2429. Bibcode:2000ASAJ..108.2419S. doi:10.1121/1.1315295. PMID 11108382.
• Ulanovsky, Nachum; Moss, Cynthia F. (7 January 2007). "Hippocampal cellular and network activity in freely moving echolocating bats". Nature Neuroscience. 10 (2): 224–233. doi:10.1038/nn1829. ISSN 1546-1726. PMID 17220886.
• Moss, Cynthia F.; Surlykke, Annemarie (1 October 2001). "Auditory scene analysis by echolocation in bats". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 110 (4): 2207–2226. Bibcode:2001ASAJ..110.2207M. doi:10.1121/1.1398051. PMID 11681397.
• Ghose, Kaushik; Horiuchi, Timothy K.; Krishnaprasad, P. S.; Moss, Cynthia F. (2006-04-18). "Echolocating Bats Use a Nearly Time-Optimal Strategy to Intercept Prey". PLOS Biology. 4 (5): e108. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0040108. ISSN 1545-7885. PMC 1436025. PMID 16605303.
• Sterbing-D'Angelo, Susanne; Chadha, Mohit; Chiu, Chen; Falk, Ben; Xian, Wei; Barcelo, Janna; Zook, John M.; Moss, Cynthia F. (2011-07-05). "Bat wing sensors support flight control". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 108 (27): 11291–11296. Bibcode:2011PNAS..10811291S. doi:10.1073/pnas.1018740108. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 3131348. PMID 21690408.
• Moss, Cynthia F.; Surlykke, Annemarie (2010-08-05). "Probing the Natural Scene by Echolocation in Bats". Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. 4. doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2010.00033. ISSN 1662-5153. PMC 2927269. PMID 20740076.

Books

• Moss, C. F., & Shettleworth, S. J. (Eds.). (1996). Neuroethological studies of cognitive and perceptual processes. Westview Press. ISBN 978-0367317003
• Thomas, J. A., Moss, C. F., & Vater, M. (Eds.). (2002). Echolocation in Bats and Dolphins. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226795980

Awards and honors

• 1992 – Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award^[5]
• 1992 – National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award^[5]
• 2010 – University of Maryland Regents Faculty Award for Research and Creativity^[9]
• 2000 – Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin^[17]
• 2001 – Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America^[8]
• 2008 – Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin^[18]
• 2012 – Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science^[8]
• 2017 – Hartman Award in Auditory Neuroscience^[19]
• 2018 – James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award^[20]
• 2018 – Fellow of the International Society for Neuroethology^[8]
• 2019 – Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize^[19]
• 2023 – Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar^[21]
• 2024-2026 -- President, International Society for Neuroethology^[22]