Back when he was a pre-med student in Germany, someone showed Randolph Helfrich a functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) image that would go on to redirect his career. The color-coded scan, which mapped out cognitive processes in an intact, living human brain, beckoned to him like a magic map to a hidden place.
"I was like, 'Wow it's possible to study the human brain and mind and all the associated cognitive functions with these big neuroscience tools and machines.' It hooked me almost two decades ago, and I still love it," said Helfrich, who joined Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences last summer. A neurologist as well as a psychologist, Helfrich did his medical residency and clinical work in neurology, and he holds a Ph.D. and did postdoctoral work in cognitive neuroscience.
In the latest edition of Office Hours, a Q&A series that introduces new Yale faculty members to the broader community, Helfrich explains what sets the human mind apart, the importance of a good night's sleep, and the power of storytelling.
| Title | Assistant professor of psychology |
|---|---|
| Research interest | The circuits and network mechanisms that underlie higher cognitive functions |
| Prior institution | Hershey Institute for Clinical Brain Research at the University Medical Center in Tübingen, Germany |
| Started at Yale | July 1, 2025 |
Tell me about your research.
Randolph Helfrich: I focus on understanding the neural mechanisms behind human cognition. It's essentially a philosophical quest to figure out the mechanisms that allow us to think about thinking and use scientific tools to dissect how the brain works. The structure that I'm most interested in is the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that evolved more in humans than in any other species and is central to all our cognitive and executive functions. My lab is part of the Department of Psychology and part of the Wu Tsai Institute.
My research is really closely aligned with the Wu Tsai Institute mission statement: taking a human-centric perspective to study human cognition, but then with a strong focus on incorporating animal experiments and cross-species comparisons, clinical questions, and patient populations into our studies. Going across scales, recording modalities is really close to my heart.
You use what is described as a "human-centric" approach in your research. Can you explain what that means?
Helfrich: Neuroscience is so interdisciplinary. There are folks who take a molecular or cellular perspective, trying to figure out what's going on in the neuron. Then there are people who take a computational perspective to establish algorithms that can explain what's going on. A human-centric perspective focuses on the behaviors that make us uniquely human. Speech, for example. I would also add reasoning and strategic planning and our cognitive control. A human-centric perspective zeroes in on those higher cognitive functions. Which approaches can we take to understand and dissect the mechanisms that underlie human cognitive function?
Can you describe some of your recent research?
Helfrich: I'm doing a line of work on sleep. We all sleep. We all love it, especially those of us who have younger kids at home or who have gone through clinical training. We're well aware of the detrimental impact of one night of bad sleep. Your attention span is short. You're emotionally a little more unstable, and there's more anxiety. All these cognitive functions are impacted, so the question is: What does sleep do?
And in the classroom, are you teaching primarily undergrads or a mix of graduate and undergrad?
Helfrich: A mix. I was involved in a few courses this year. I have two graduate students in my lab here, and I'm teaching an advanced undergraduate level course now. I teach an undergraduate course focused on the human brain and neuropsychology. It's basically what we've learned about human behavior from patients with brain lesions. I use patient-centric storytelling to introduce topics, and it really hooks students. I've used famous examples, such as Michael Jackson, to illustrate the effects of insomnia and of sleep medications. We talked about the actor Bruce Willis, who was diagnosed with aphasia, which is a symptom of, in his case, frontotemporal dementia. We discussed Muhammad Ali as someone who had traumatic encephalopathy, which gives rise to a Parkinson's-like syndrome. And we covered the experiences of Ronald Reagan, who had Alzheimer's.
What are your other hobbies or interests?
Helfrich: We have two young kids, so we're pretty busy. But I play a lot of music. I play guitar and piano. I've tried my hands on various other instruments over the years. I'm also an avid cook, and I like to bake. I did my postdoc in the Bay Area, where I discovered San Francisco sourdough. I loved it, and brought it home when I moved back to Germany in 2019. Hiking is another one of my favorites, just getting outdoors and especially enjoying the U.S. national parks. The great outdoors was a big draw for us to come back to the U.S. It's a gorgeous country.
