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Elizabeth (Lissa) Riley received her undergraduate degree from MIT and her PhD from the Boston University School of Medicine. She trained at the Boston VA Healthcare System and Harvard Medical School as a Special Geriatric Fellow before coming to Cornell as a postdoctoral fellow with a National Institute on Aging National Research Service Award F32 fellowship. She is now a Research Associate. In 2024, she was named a National Institute on Aging Butler Williams Scholar.

My work can be best described as comparative cognitive neuroscience, which is characterized by two related approaches. One is a cross-species approach, comparing rat models of the neurochemistry of attention and learning to humans, focusing on the neurochemical acetylcholine. The other is an across the lifespan approach, examining the cholinergic hypothesis of age-related changes in cognition.

We use activity mapping from fMRI data to provide theoretical models that can then be more fully tested

I am a professor in the Department of Psychology, director of the Purpose Science and innovation Exchange and co-founder of Purpose Commons. I received my B.A. in Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and my Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Florida International University. I completed my postdoctoral training within the Multicultural Research Institute at the University of Notre Dame.

My research follows two paths. The first investigates why having a sense of self-direction – or purpose