George (Ron) Mangun (PhD) is the Director of the Center for Mind and Brain, and Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neurology at the University of California, Davis. He was the founding Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University, and served as Dean of Social Sciences at UC Davis from 2008 to 2015. He leads the Laboratory for the Neural Mechanisms of Attention, and serves as Director of the Kavli Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience, an international training program supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Kavli Foundation. His research investigates how humans are able to focus attention and prevent distraction in order to improve perception, learning and performance.

Professor Mangun has consulted on numerous university, U.S. government and international scientific panels and advisory boards, including for the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the European Research Council and the Max Planck Society. He is co-author of the leading textbook,Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind (W.W. Norton, 2019); now in its fifth edition, the book has been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese and Chinese. Professor Mangun was editor of Cognitive Brain Researchand an associate editor of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, and iscurrently the interim President and Treasurer of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. Among other honors he is an elected fellow of theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).