He teaches such courses as Animal Cognition; Introduction to Statistics; Psychology of Learning; Senior Research Seminars; and Theories of Learning.

Professor Balsam seeks to understand how animals use temporal information to solve problems in flexible ways. His ongoing projects investigate the way that time is perceived, encoded and retrieved by animals and how this information guides their decisions about whether, when, and how to respond. He studies the brain mechanisms that underlie this very important aspect of adaptive behavior.