Michael Gazzaniga

From Psy3241

File:Http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2005/02/images/gazzaniga.jpg

Michael Gazzaniga is one of the worlds leading neuroscientists. He is a psychology professor at the University of California Santa Barbara and director for the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind. His research focuses on patients that have undergone split-brain surgery and that have revealed lateralization of functions across the cerebral hemispheres. He has advanced our understanding of functional lateralization in the brain and how the cerebral hemispheres communicate with one another.

Contents 1 History 2 Achievements 3 Publications 4 References

History

Gazzaniga was born on December 12, 1939. As a child, he was always fascinated with examining things and even set up his own laboratory in his garage in high school to study the enzymes of rabbit muscle. His father, brothers, and sisters all loved to meddle around with surgical procedures as well. With this interest of his, he received a summer fellowship from Roger W Sperry at Caltech where he studied nerve growth. He later went on to Dartmouth for undergradate school and graduated 1961 and received a Ph.D in psychobiology from the California Institute of Technology in 1964 where he worked under Roger Sperry with primary responsibility for initiating human split-brain research.

Achievements

Director of the Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience, President of the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute, Member of the, President's Council on Bioethics, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Founded the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, Fellow of the Advancement of Science, the American Neurological Association, American, Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and awarded a National Institute of Physiology

Publications

The Social Brain, Mind Matters, Nature's Mind, The Cognitive Neurosciences III, and The Ethical Brain which was published in 2005

His teaching and research career include the following: The University of California at Davis, Dartmouth Medical School, The State University of New York at Stony Brook, NYU of graduate school, and University of California, Santa Barbara

Michael Gazzaniga is currently a professor at Dartmouth College and Director of the Program in Cognitive Neuroscience and special assistant to the Provost for Science Development at Dartmouth. He is married and has 5 daughters and a son.

References

[1] [2] [3]