Paul Richard Adams, FRS is a neuroscientist currently serving as a Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at

Stony Brook University Stony Brook University (SBU), officially the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a public research university in Stony Brook, New York. Along with the University at Buffalo, it is one of the State University of New York syste ...

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

. He graduated from

London University The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degr ...

with a PhD, and did postdoctoral work with

Bert Sakmann Bert Sakmann (; born 12 June 1942) is a German cell physiologist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Erwin Neher in 1991 for their work on "the function of single ion channels in cells," and the invention of the patch clam ...

at the

Max Planck Institute Max or MAX may refer to: Animals * Max (dog) (1983–2013), at one time purported to be the world's oldest living dog * Max (English Springer Spaniel), the first pet dog to win the PDSA Order of Merit (animal equivalent of OBE) * Max (gorilla) ...

. He won the Novartis Memorial Prize in 1979 and the Gaddum Memorial Award in 1984, both from the British Pharmacological Society. He was made a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellow in 1986, and elected as a

Fellow of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the judges of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematic ...

in 1991. From 1987 to 1995 he was an investigator at the

Howard Hughes Medical Institute The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is an American non-profit medical research organization based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. It was founded in 1953 by Howard Hughes, an American business magnate, investor, record-setting pilot, engineer, f ...

. With others, he pioneered the concepts of

open channel block A channel blocker is the biological mechanism in which a particular molecule is used to prevent the opening of ion channels in order to produce a physiological response in a cell. Channel blocking is conducted by different types of molecules, suc ...

and

neuromodulation Neuromodulation is the physiological process by which a given neuron uses one or more chemicals to regulate diverse populations of neurons. Neuromodulators typically bind to metabotropic, G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) to initiate a second ...

, which now play central roles in neuroscience. He is now working on a theory about the neocortex, centering on the idea that sophisticated learning requires extremely specific synaptic strength adjustments. He (working with Kingsley Cox) has proposed that this problem could be overcome, in the neocortex, by a process called “Hebbian proofreading”, using some neurons (e.g. in layer 6) as detectors of correlated activity between other neurons (e.g. in thalamus and upper layers), which then edit recent plasticity at the corresponding thalamocortical synapses.Adams, P. R., and K. J. A. Cox. "A neurobiological perspective on building intelligent devices." Neuromorphic Eng 3.1 (2006): 2-8.

Patents

Neuromorphic Device for Proofreading Connection Adjustments in Hardware Artificial Neural Networks

References

External links

Adams's page at Stony Brook's Pharmacology site

Fellows of the Royal Society Stony Brook University faculty MacArthur Fellows Howard Hughes Medical Investigators Alumni of the University of London Living people Year of birth missing (living people) {{neuroscientist-stub