Christine Chesebrough

Christine Chesebrough is a cognitive neuroscientist whose work sits at the intersection of brain science, creativity, and the arts. Her research investigates the neural dynamics of insight, imagination, and attentional state using multimodal approaches including intracranial EEG, eye tracking, and naturalistic paradigms such as film and music. She is particularly interested in how internally-oriented and altered consciousness states such as mind-wandering, “aha” moments, psychedelic states, and flow states unfold over time and contribute to learning and creative cognition.

Christine is currently a postdoctoral research scientist at the Feinstein Institutes for Biomedical Research at Northwell Health in Manhasset, New York. In this role, she works with epilepsy patients who undergo extended monitoring in the hospital for seizures, while their neural activity is recorded directly with implanted electrodes. With this special patient population, she works on an NIH-funded project examining the neuroscience of mind-wandering and how our attention fluctuates between the external environment, our internal thoughts, and interoceptive states.

Christine also serves as Organizing Co-Chair for the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity (SfNC), where she leads the development of interdisciplinary programming that brings together scientists, artists, and scholars across domains. Her work emphasizes building meaningful dialogue between neuroscience and lived creative practice, with a focus on fostering spaces where rigorous science and artistic expression can inform and inspire one another.

Christine earned her PhD in Cognitive and Brain Sciences from Drexel University under the advisement of John Kounios and Evangelia Chrysikou, both pioneering and prominent scholars in the neuroscience of creativity. Previously, she earned her BA in Cognitive Science and French Literature from Johns Hopkins University, and her MA in Cognitive Science in Education from Columbia University Teacher's College, where she worked as a research assistant examining the mechanisms of knowledge transfer in classroom studies with middle school students. Prior to earning her PhD, Christine worked for years as a research consultant at the NeuroLeadership Institute, an influential talent management and leadership development consultancy that applies the science of learning and human development to the workplace.