Director of Life Sciences and the Director of Brain Initiatives
Caroline Montojo, Ph.D., is the director of Life Sciences and the director of Brain Initiatives at The Kavli Foundation, where she works to advance science and support a thriving enterprise of science. Dr. Montojo is passionate about building strong partnerships and international collaborations for the advancement of science, and promotes the importance of cross-cultural, global dialogue on anticipatory ethics in science and emerging technologies. She joined the foundation in 2015 and currently co-leads the foundation’s Science Program, overseeing The Kavli Foundation’s research institutes at leading universities around the world.
Dr. Montojo is deeply involved in catalytic efforts to advance neuroscience, including the U.S. BRAIN Initiative and the International Brain Initiative. She spearheaded the collaborative development of an innovative framework for the International Brain Initiative (IBI), which aims to catalyze and advance neuroscience through international collaboration and knowledge sharing among the large-scale, nationally sponsored brain initiatives around the world. She has served as an elected spokesperson for the IBI since 2019, giving talks at multiple scientific conferences about both the IBI and The Kavli Foundation, such as the International Conference on Learning and Memory, the US National Institutes of Health Advisory Committee to the Director of NIH Working Group on BRAIN Initiative 2.0, and the UC Irvine Brain Initiative Launch. She also contributes to publications on international neuroscience and neuroethics in editorials, articles, and perspectives.
Prior to joining the foundation, Dr. Montojo completed postdoctoral research in the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research at UCLA focused on investigating neural biomarkers for psychiatric illness using functional magnetic resonance imaging and behavioral techniques, for which she was awarded the Arnold Scheibel Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow in Neuroscience Award and the Stephen R. Mallory Schizophrenia Research Award. Dr. Montojo received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and completed her M.A. and Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University. She holds a Women in Leadership Certificate from the Cornell SC Johnson School of Business and is an invited member of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Neurotechnology and the National Academy of Sciences, Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disorders.