Emma Sarro, PhD, is the Senior Director of Research at the NeuroLeadership Institute. She translates cognitive and social neuroscience into actionable solutions for organizations as well as helps to communicate relevant research in an accessible manner for the public. Emma’s background in neuroscience allows her to gather and share key insights from science to help create more innovative, inclusive, and healthy environments for the benefit of employees and organizations. Emma Sarro, PhD, is a researcher at the NeuroLeadership Institute, where she focuses on translating cognitive and social neuroscience into actionable solutions for organizations as well as helps to communicate relevant research in an accessible manner for the public. Previously, she served as a professor at Dominican College and New York University and as a researcher at the Nathan Kline Institute. She holds a PhD in neuroscience from New York University and a bachelor's degree from Brown University.

Emma has always been fascinated with the complexity of the brain and how it relates to and modifies our behavior. Specifically, her interests and research have focused on the brain’s ability to demonstrate plasticity in response to all kinds of experiences. Her doctoral work explored the development of auditory perception and the influence that sensory experience has on auditory perceptual abilities and neurophysiology. As a postdoctoral researcher, she went on to research the influence of social experience on neural activity. Specifically, she examined the impact of maternal care and early-life trauma on neural activity in the infant brain in a rodent model. Her work has led to peer reviewed articles and has contributed to book chapters as well as academic texts.

Before joining NLI, Emma was a tenured professor of Biology and Neuroscience at Dominican College in New York, whose students explored experience-dependent changes in learning and memory of invertebrates and human models. She received her BS from Brown University in Human Biology, and PhD in Neuroscience from the Center for Neural Science at New York University.