Robert H. Wurtz

Robert Henry Wurtz (born March 28, 1936 in St. Louis , Missouri ) is an American neurobiologist who deals with the neurobiology of vision and eye movements , which he mainly studies in monkeys .

Wurtz received his bachelor's degree from Oberlin College in 1958 and his PhD in physiological psychology from the University of Michigan in 1962 with James Olds. As a post-doctoral student he was at Washington University from 1962 to 1965 (on slow potential changes in the cerebral cortex), from 1965/66 to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and was a scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH ), where he studied the synaptic plasticity of Aplysia and began studying the visual perception of monkeys. During this time he was also a visiting scientist at the Laboratory of Physiology at Cambridge University for a year . From 1978 to 2002 he was the founding director of the Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research at the National Eye Institute.

He examined the brain processes and brain regions involved in the various forms of eye movement and the part of the processing of visual information that precedes the triggering of eye movements. In doing so, he also determined regions of the brain that are responsible for the attention in the visual system and its shift from one object to another.

In 1987 Wurtz received the W. Alden Spencer Award , the Golden Brain Award in 1991 , the Gruber Prize for Neuroscience in 2010 and the Ralph W. Gerard Prize in 2006 . He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1988) and its Institute of Medicine (1997) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1990). In 1990/91 he was President of the Society for Neuroscience .

Web links

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Individual evidence

1. ↑ Life data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004