Luiz Pessoa received a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and a masters in Computer Engineering from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He obtained a PhD in computational neuroscience at Boston University, USA, and postdoctoral training at the National Institute of Mental Health, USA. Since 2011, he has been at the Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, where he is full Professor and Director of the Maryland Neuroimaging Center. His research interests center around the interactions between emotion/motivation and perception/cognition. His most recent book is “The entangled brain: How perception, cognition, and emotion are woven together” by MIT Press (2022) and is aimed at a general audience interested in science.