Wolfram Schultz is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge known for his discovery of the neurophysiological

dopamine Dopamine (DA, a contraction of 3,4-dihydroxyphenethylamine) is a neuromodulatory molecule that plays several important roles in cells. It is an organic chemical of the catecholamine and phenethylamine families. It is an amine synthesized ...

reward signal.

Life and career

Schultz received his medical degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1972 and his PhD (habilitation) in Physiology from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He completed three postdoctoral research fellowships: with the neurophysiologist Otto Creutzfeld at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Gottingen, Germany, the neurophysiologist John C. Eccles at State University of New York at Buffalo in the USA, and the neurohistologist and neuropsychopharmacist Urban Ungerstedt at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Schultz worked at the University of Fribourg from 1977 to 2001 and then moved to the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

in 2001, where he is Professor of Neuroscience (and has been Wellcome Principal Research Fellow from 2001 to 2023).

Research

During the 1980s and 1990s, Schultz was experimenting with

macaque The macaques () constitute a genus (''Macaca'') of gregarious Old World monkeys of the subfamily Cercopithecinae. The 23 species of macaques inhabit ranges throughout Asia, North Africa, and Europe (in Gibraltar). Macaques are principally f ...

monkeys when he found that dopamine neurons in their

basal ganglia The basal ganglia (BG) or basal nuclei are a group of subcortical Nucleus (neuroanatomy), nuclei found in the brains of vertebrates. In humans and other primates, differences exist, primarily in the division of the globus pallidus into externa ...

increased in activity after they were given a reward. This led to the discovery for which he is best known: dopamine neurons signal errors in reward prediction (the difference between the reward an animal expects and the reward it actually receives). He subsequently carried his work to the neuroeconomics of reward and decision-making, using concepts from economic choice theory and studying dopamine neurons, orbitofrontal cortex, striatum and amygdala.

Honours and awards

He won the Golden Brain Award in 2002,

The Brain Prize The Brain Prize, formerly known as The Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Prize, is an international scientific award honouring "one or more scientists who have distinguished themselves by an outstanding contribution to neuroscience and who are ...

in 2017, the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience in 2018, the

Karl Spencer Lashley Award The Karl Spencer Lashley Award is awarded by The American Philosophical Society as a recognition of research on the integrative neuroscience of behavior. The award was established in 1957 by a gift from Dr. Karl Spencer Lashley. Recipients * 20 ...

in 2019, and has an h-index of 101. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Member of the Academia Europaea and past president of the European Brain and Behaviour Society.

Selected publications

* * * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Schultz, Wolfram Living people Fellows of Churchill College, Cambridge German neuroscientists Year of birth missing (living people)