Dr. Albert Powers is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at Yale University, Director of the Powers Laboratory at Yale, and Medical and Associate Director of the Yale PRIME Psychosis Risk Clinic. His research applies computational methods to understand hallucinations and other psychotic symptoms.

Dr. Powers grew up in Northford, Connecticut and earned his BA in Cognitive Science from Yale in 2004. He completed his MD and PhD at Vanderbilt University, studying multisensory integration with Dr. Mark Wallace, then returned to Yale for psychiatry residency before joining the faculty in 2018. His research has provided evidence that hallucinations arise when the brain over-relies on prior expectations relative to incoming sensory information, causing people to perceive things that aren't there. His laboratory’s work suggests that these insights may form the basis for understanding how psychotic symptoms develop by linking neural, computational, and phenomenological findings across levels of description and time.

Supported by the NIMH and other private foundations, Dr. Powers's lab uses neuroimaging, electrophysiology, and computational modeling to map the trajectory from early perceptual changes to full psychotic symptoms. Ongoing work focuses on voluntary control over hallucinations as well as mechanisms underlying the emergence of psychosis during the menopause transition. As Medical and Associate Director of the PRIME Clinic, he treats individuals experiencing early signs of psychosis while studying how symptoms emerge and evolve over time. Dr. Powers serves as an Associate Editor for Frontiers in Neuroimaging and Frontiers in Cognition as well as co-editor of Perceptual Dysregulation in Psychiatric Nosology, a new volume in the Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences book series.