He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2006 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Diego studying memory and amnesia. As a philosophy major in college, Dr. Kirwan became fascinated by the brain and the philosophy of mind—specifically with the mind-body problem of how mental events arise from physical substrates. His subsequent work with animal models of amnesia and functional MRI (or fMRI) has led to more than 35 peer-reviewed publications and two book chapters. His current research interests center around how the brain forms specific long-term memories for highly overlapping events and how the methods of cognitive neuroscience can be applied in different research and social settings.