Robert S. Astur

Dr. Robert Astur is Director of the Virtual Reality Laboratory at the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut. He also is Assistant Professor in Psychiatry at Yale University. His background is in Neuroscience with particular emphasis on the neurobiology of memory. Accordingly, Dr. Astur has studied memory processes in monkeys, chimpanzees, orangutans, and rodents. His current work involves using VR to study memory processing in people with psychiatric illness such as schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, or drug abuse. Dr. Astur also uses functional brain imaging while people are navigating through virtual environments in order to determine brain areas involved in spatial navigation and how these brain areas differ between genders and psychiatric illnesses.