Elizabeth Anya Phelps is the Pershing Square Professor of Human Neuroscience at Harvard University in the Department of Psychology. She is a cognitive neuroscientist known for her research at the intersection of memory, learning, and emotion. She was the recipient of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society Distinguished Scholar Award and the 21st Century Scientist Award from the James S. McDonnell Foundation, as well as other honors and awards in her field. Phelps was honored with the 2018 Thomas William Salmon Lecture and Medal in Psychiatry at the New York Academy of Medicine. She received the 2019 William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science which acknowledged how her "multidisciplinary body of research has probed the influence of emotion across cognitive and behavioral domains using novel imaging techniques and neuropsychological studies grounded in animal models of learning."
Phelps is a past-president of the APS, past-president of the Society for NeuroEconomics, and a founding board member of the Society for Neuroethics.