Michael Gazzaniga
Professor of Psychology and the Director for the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California Santa Barbara.
Dr. Michael S. Gazzaniga received
his A.B. from Dartmouth College He then attended the
California Institute of Technology, where he received
his Ph.D. in Psychobiology. Here he worked under the
guidance of Roger Sperry, with primary responsibility
for initiating human split-brain research—research
that won Sperry the Nobel Prize. After stints in various
academic settings from California to New York, Dr.
Gazzaniga became the Andrew W. Thompson, Jr. Professor
of Psychiatry and Director of the Program in Cognitive
Neurosciences at Dartmouth Medical School. In 1992
he became the Director of the Center for Neuroscience
at the University of California-Davis. In 1996, Dr.
Gazzaniga's alma mater called him back to help them
lead a new program in the mind sciences. Until recently,
he was, the David. T. McLaughlin Distinguished University
Professor at Dartmouth College and the Director of
the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. Most recently
he has returned to California to become the first director
of the Sage Center for the Study of Mind at the University
of California, Santa Barbara. Through his extensive
work with split-brain patients, Dr. Gazzaniga has made
important advances in our understanding of functional
lateralization in the human brain and of how the cerebral
hemispheres communicate with one another. His research
is well known not only in clinical and basic science
circles, but to the lay public as well. He captured
the main features of this work in his widely acclaimed
book, The Social Brain, 1985 (Basic Books).
His book, Mind Matters, 1988 (Houghton Mifflin)
served as an introduction to problems in mental disorders.
In 1992 he published Nature's Mind (Basic
Books) which the New York Times said “would do for
brain research what Stephen Hawking had done for cosmology.” His
landmark 1995 book for MIT Press, The Cognitive
Neurosciences, featured the work of 92 scientists.
It is now recognized as the sourcebook for the field,
and is in its third edition. In 2005 he published,
The Ethical Brain ; His new book, Human will
be out in the summer of 2008. Dr. Gazzaniga is the
president of The Cognitive Neuroscience Institute,
which he founded in 1982, and is the Editor-in-Chief
emeritus of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience,
which he also founded. In 1997, Dr. Gazzaniga was elected
to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He
also has the Past-President of the American Psychological
Society. He also serves on the President's Council
on Bioethics and in 2005 he was elected to the National
Academies Institute of Medicine. In 2009 he will be
presenting the Gifford Lectures at the University of
Edenburgh.
http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/~gazzanig
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