Paul Glimcher

Paul W. Glimcher (born November 3, 1961) is an American neuroeconomist, neuroscientist, psychologist, economist, scholar, and entrepreneur. He is considered an influential researcher in the study of human behavior and decision-making. He is also known for his central role in founding and developing the field of neuroeconomics. Glimcher founded the Institute for the Study of Decision Making at New York University (NYU). Since 2012, he has served as Head of the Department of Neuroscience and Director of the Neurosciences Institute at NYU's Grossman School of Medicine.

Glimcher holds the Julius Silver, Rosyln S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Chair of Neural Science at NYU in the College of Arts and Sciences, where he is involved in professorial appointments in economics and psychology. He is also responsible for neuroscience and physiology at the NYU School of Medicine. He founded the HUMAN Project, a large-scale interdisciplinary longitudinal study, and Data-cubed Health, a start-up company focused on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technologies in the healthcare industry and biomedical/behavioral research domain. He was the lead editor of the textbook ''Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain, 2 edition''.

Early life and education

Paul W. Glimcher was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Arne and Mildred Glimcher. His father, Arne Glimcher, founded the New York City-based Pace Gallery, the second-largest private art gallery in the world. In contrast to the artistic interests of his father, Paul Glimcher was interested in science and technology from an early age.

Growing up in New York City, Glimcher attended the prestigious Dalton School in Manhattan. In 1983, Glimcher received an A.B. ''magna cum laude'' in neuroscience from Princeton University. In 1989, he received a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania, studying under the American psychologist, C. Randy Gallistel. Glimcher's was the first doctoral degree in neuroscience awarded by the University of Pennsylvania.

Glimcher's post-doctoral training was in oculomotor physiology. Working with Professor David Sparks (University of Pennsylvania) researching the brainstem and mesencephalic nuclei that control eye rotations, Glimcher uncovered evidence that structures participating in the execution of saccadic eye movements might be involved in planning those movements as well. Glimcher's earlier work focused on the identification and characterization of signals that intervene between the neural processes that engage in sensory encoding and the neural processes that engage in movement generation, which underlie decision-making.

Since that time, his methodologies have broadened to include techniques from experimental economics, behavioral economics, econometrics, and brain imaging, most notably the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for behavioral research. His work also advanced the notion of subjective value, which is widely identified as the neurobiological correlate of economic utility.

Career and role in founding neuroeconomics

In 1994, Glimcher began work as an assistant professor in neural science at New York University. In 2001, he was promoted to Associate Professor Of Neural Science And Psychology.

In 2004, he founded the Center for Neuroeconomics at New York University, one of the first research centers ever dedicated to the field. In 2006, Glimcher became an Associate Professor In Economics in addition to his postings in neural science and psychology, and in 2008 he was promoted to full Professor of Neural Science, Economics, and Psychology. In 2010, Glimcher became the Silver Endowed Chair in Neural Science. In March 2014, the Center for Neuroeconomics became the Institute for the Study of Decision Making.

Neuroeconomics began to develop in the late 1990s as a natural outgrowth of the simultaneous maturation of many different disciplines, such as neuroscience, psychology, and economics. Glimcher was instrumental in facilitating the development of the bourgeoning of the field by recognizing these trends and arguing that future behavioral science research would require an interdisciplinary approach to overcome the inherent research limitations of any one discipline. He co-authored what is often referred to as the first academic paper in neuroeconomics, with American neurobiologist, Michael Platt, which was published in the journal ''Nature'' in 1999.Platt, M.L. and Glimcher, P.W. (1999) Neural correlates of decision variables in parietal cortex. Nature. 400: 233-238 His first book, ''Decisions, Uncertainty and the Brain: The Science of Neuroeconomics'' (MIT Press) was published in 2003 and is often identified as the first to use the word ''neuroeconomics''. It won the PROSE Award for Best Medical Science Book of 2003.

In 2004, he founded the Center for Neuroeconomics at NYU while serving as the founding president of the Society for Neuroeconomics. The Center for Neuroeconomics became the Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Decision Making in 2014 and the Institute for the Study of Decision Making in 2017.

In 2009 he served as lead editor along with Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, and Russell Poldrack of the first textbook dedicated to neuroeconomics: ''Neuroeconomics Decision-Making and the Brain'' (2008, Elsevier). The book won the 2009 PROSE Award for Excellence in the Economic and Social Sciences. In 2011, he published ''Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis'' (2011, Oxford) and in 2014, with Ernst Fehr, he completed a second edition of this textbook.

The HUMAN Project

In 2014, Glimcher worked with Miyoung Chun of the Kavli Foundation and began developing a new interdisciplinary longitudinal study, called the Kavli HUMAN Project. The project is a "big human data" research platform that took its inspiration from big data surveys in other disciplines. In particular, the astronomy community's Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The survey will study tens of thousands of Americans for decades, much like past longitudinal studies, such as the Framingham Heart Study.

Datacubed Health LLC

In 2016, in light of governmental fiscal austerity for basic research at all levels, Glimcher founded Human Project Inc., an NYU incubator company. It was established to develop the foundational technologies used by The HUMAN Project, whose funding is supplemented by limited federal and philanthropic funding, and commercialize those technologies to generate revenue to sustain its long-term operation. Now called Datacubed Healthcare, its product is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which can enable new analytical methods for large-scale datasets, conducting clinical or basic biomedical/behavioral research, and recruiting and retaining human research subjects. Today Datacubed Health sells its product to Pharma and CROs. Glimcher is currently the CSO of Datacubed Health.

Research

Glimcher's research aims to describe the neural events that underlie behavioral decision-making using tools from neuroscience, psychology, and economics. His research merges psychological and economic models with computational neuroscience, including the uses of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for behavioral science, to understand how value is encoded in the brain and how the brain uses those neural representations of value to guide decision-making. For example, how the brain carries out delay discounting or action-selection in the face of risk and ambiguity. His laboratory in NYU's Center for Neural Science performs cohort studies in experimental economics, brain imaging, and single-neuron studies in non-human animals.

His most notable contributions are in the development of neuroeconomics, studies of dopamine and reinforcement learning, elucidating the neurobiological basis of human preferences, how people make intertemporal choices, and pioneering the application of "normalized representation" to decision-making.

In 1999, with neuroscientist Michael Platt, Glimcher was the first to demonstrate a utility-like value signal in the brain of a living creature. This finding appeared in the peer-reviewed journal ''Nature''. In 2004, he cooperated with Michael Dorris to publish the first experimental test of the hypothesis that the Nash equilibrium in strategic games specifies an internal representation of value in the peer-reviewed journal ''Neuron''. They found that, as hypothesized by Nash, mixed strategy equilibria emerge when the subject values of options being mixed are equivalent.

Glimcher's laboratory has conducted extensive research on the brain's reward system and, in particular, the dopamine system and reinforcement learning. In 2005, with Hannah Bayer, he published the first quantitative test of the "dopamine reward prediction error hypothesis" based on single neuron recordings from dopamine neurons and a novel kernel-based analysis in ''Neuron''.

In 2007, Glimcher and Joe Kable were the first to demonstrate a clear subject value signal in the human brain that could be effectively disassociated from objective value signals. This finding was published in '' Nature Neuroscience''. In 2010, with Andrew Caplin, Mark Dean, and Robb Rutledge, he published the first example of an axiomatic economic analysis applied to the neurobiology of decision-making in ''The Quarterly Journal of Economics''. This paper was also the first in a first-tier economic journal to include images of brain scans.

In 2011, with Ifat Levy, Stephanie Lazzaro, and Robb Rutledge, he published the first demonstration that activity patterns in the human medial prefrontal cortex, measured in the absence of choice behavior, could be used to predict later choices by the same individuals in the '' Journal of Neuroscience''. In 2013, with Kenway Louie and Mel Win Khaw, he demonstrated that efficient compressive encoding of subjective value by neurons in the brains of monkeys predicts novel anomalies in choice behavior which they subsequently observed in both monkeys and humans. These findings were published in the ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences''.

In 2016, Glimcher and co-authors explained how a preexisting survey-based methodology for valuing public environmental goods (e.g. public parks) - " Contingent Valuation" - could be refined with a neuro-economical approach. Glimcher et al. incorporated fMRI measurements to contrast with the outputs of traditional contingent valuation. Their research showed that the way people value environmental public goods differs on a neurobiological level from "neural activity associated with previously examined goods and preference measures". In other words, people value environmental goods differently from other tangible goods, like food or clothing. While further research is required in this line of inquiry, the research could influence public policy and how scientists communicate with the public about dangers posed to the environment and/or shared resources.

Glimcher's research has appeared in academic journals in economics, psychology, and neuroscience, as well as in general scholarly journals such as ''Nature'', ''Science,'' and the ''Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences''. He has published nearly 100 academic articles with colleagues, postdoctoral fellows, and students.

Honors and other work

Glimcher is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the McKnight, Whitehall, Klingenstein, and McDonnell Foundations, as well as a member of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives. He has been an investigator of the National Eye Institute, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and the National Institute on Aging. He has also won the Margaret and Herman Sokol Faculty Award in the Sciences in 2003 and NYU's Distinguished (Lifetime Accomplishment) Teaching Award in 2006. His 2009 textbook on neuroeconomics received the American Association of Publishers PROSE Award for Excellence in the Social Sciences.

Glimcher has served on numerous advisory boards and research study committees operated by the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, including:
* Presenter to the Social and Behavioral Sciences Decadal Survey (2016)
* Committee on Making the Soldier Decision on Future Battlefields (2013)
* Committee on Opportunities in Neuroscience for Future Army Applications (2009)
* Two terms on the Army Research Lab Technical Assessment Board
He has also been a reviewer on multiple proposal and program review panels for the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Popular press

Glimcher's work has also been featured in popular press such as ''Time'', ''Newsweek'', ''The Los Angeles Times'', National Public Radio, BBC, ''Le Monde'', ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,'' ''Quanta Magazine'', ''New York Magazine'', ''Science'', ''NewScientist'', ''Fast Company'', ''Vox'', and ''The Atlantic's'' CityLab.

Books

*
*
*
*

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Glimcher, Paul
Economists from New York (state)
American neuroscientists
21st-century American psychologists
New York University faculty
Living people
Princeton University alumni
University of Pennsylvania alumni
Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
1961 births
Dalton School alumni
21st-century American economists
American textbook writers
20th-century American psychologists