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Sze Chai Kwok

Associate Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke Kunshan University
DKU Faculty

Overview


Kwok's research lies at the intersection among neuroscience, behavior, and cognition. He is head of the Laboratory of Phylo-Cognition (www.kwoklab.org) and his research team studies the neural bases of memory, episodic time, metacognition, and other related higher cognitive processes across mammalian species. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include cognitive neuroscience, research methods, and behavioral sciences.

He is author of 60 academic papers in leading journals such as eLife, the Journal of Neuroscience, and Communications Biology. He is recipient of the Jiangsu 333 Talent Program (2024), Kunshan Shortage Talent Program (2023), Jiangsu Qinglan Award (2021), Young IBRO Regions Connecting Award (2020), and Shanghai Pujiang Talent Program Award (2016). He is an elected member of the professional society Memory Disorders Research Society (2021). He serves as handling editor for the journal Cognitive Processing (Springer) since 2020.

Kwok has a bachelor's degree in social sciences from the University of Hong Kong and a DPhil in experimental psychology from the University of Oxford. He worked in Santa Lucia Hospital in Roma between 2009 and 2015. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he was associate professor at East China Normal University and held a scholar-in-residence position at NYU Shanghai.

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Associate Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke Kunshan University · 2020 - Present DKU Faculty
Faculty Network Member of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences · 2020 - Present Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, University Institutes and Centers

Recent Publications


Neural Representation of Episodic Time.

Journal Article The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · November 2025 Inspired by recent discoveries of neural populations that track time for specific moments (time cells) and elapsed durations (temporal context and periodic time cells), this review, based on a minisymposium presented at the 2025 annual meeting of the Socie ... Full text Cite

What makes a theory of consciousness unscientific?

Journal Article Nature neuroscience · April 2025 Full text Cite
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Education, Training & Certifications


University of Oxford (United Kingdom) · 2008 Ph.D.