Francisco Aboitiz
Chilean neuroscientist, academic, and author
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Aboitiz's research spans comparative neuroanatomy, focusing on interhemispheric connections and brain asymmetries, the evolution of the cerebral cortex and language networks, cognitive functions in neuropsychiatric conditions (including ADHD, ASD, and schizophrenia) mainly using high-density EEG and brain imaging, and cognitive mechanisms studied through intracranial recordings in epilepsy patients. He has authored and edited more than 140 scientific articles and several books including From Attention to Goal-Directed Behavior: Neurodynamical, methodological and clinical trends, coauthored with Diego Cosmelli, and A Brain for Speech: A view from Evolutionary Neuroanatomy. His forthcoming book, A History of Bodies, Brains and Minds. The evolution of life and consciousness, is to be published in September 2024.
Education
Aboitiz pursued higher education at the Universidad de Chile (UCh), earning a Licenciatura en Biología in 1983, with professors Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Following this, he continued his studies and obtained a PhD in neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1991, tutored by Eran Zaidel and Arnold Scheibel.
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Career
Aboitiz's career started as a Research Fellow at the Beth Israel Hospital of Harvard Medical School, working in Norman Geschwind's and Albert Galaburda's laboratory, from 1983 to 1985, studying the neurological bases of language and developmental dyslexia. From 1985 to 1991, he pursued his PhD at UCLA. Then, he held a postdoctoral position at Robin Fisher's laboratory at the Mental Retardation Research Center of UCLA, from 1991 to 1992. After this, he returned to Chile and served as a professor at the Medical School of Universidad de Chile (UCh) from 1992 until 2002, where he became director of the Morphology Department at the Institute for Biomedical Sciences of the Medical School at UCh. Since 2002, he has been appointed as a professor at the Psychiatry Department of the Medical School of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC).
Between 2002 and 2006, Aboitiz participated as sub-director of the Millennium Center for Integrative Neuroscience, CENI, under the Millennium Scientific Initiative Program (ICM) promoted by the Chilean government. In 2009, he created and has been the current director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Neuroscience NeuroUC.
In 2010, Aboitiz developed the Neuroscience PhD Program at PUC. In 2011, he was awarded as Director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Memory, CENEM, one of the seven new Millennium Scientific Nuclei. He holds the position of the Principal Investigator at the Laboratorio de Neurociencia Cognitiva y Evolutiva (LANCE), where he has directed more than 20 PhD theses.
Research
Initially in his career, Aboitiz focused on the comparative neuroanatomy of interhemispheric connections and brain asymmetries in humans and other mammals. He also investigated the cerebral cortex's origins in early mammals, proposing hypotheses that challenged established views that considered the mammalian cerebral cortex as a derivative of an ancestral reptilian-like brain. He suggested that the brains of reptiles and mammals underwent separate evolutionary histories, while also exploring the neuroanatomy of language networks, identifying their potential homologues in monkeys and suggesting a framework for human language circuits' evolution. In addition to this, his work in medical faculties has involved studying cognitive functions in various neuropsychiatric conditions, such as ADHD, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and schizophrenia, as well as language processing and social behavior in healthy individuals.
In one of his highly cited studies, Aboitiz contributed to a study of four brains of men with developmental dyslexia. The neuroanatomical findings showed that men with developmental dyslexia had developmental anomalies in the cerebral cortex, deviations from standard cerebral asymmetry, and associations with non-right handedness and autoimmune illnesses. His PhD thesis described the regional differentiation in fiber types within the human corpus callosum, finding patterns of density variation, no significant sex differences, and no correlation between overall fiber density and callosal area. Later, he proposed a hypothesis for the evolutionary development of the corpus callosum, highlighting how its fiber structure facilitates interhemispheric communication, particularly in sensory areas, and how brain size impacts this connectivity, potentially influencing brain lateralization.
Aboitiz has also led a research line concerning the cognitive mechanisms involved in the pathology of neuropsychiatric conditions, especially ADHD, and has used new neurotechnologies for scientific research, including high-density electroencephalography (EEG), neuroimaging (MRI and fMRI) and intracranial electrophysiological recordings in humans (ECoG). Additionally, he proposed a theory for the evolutionary origin of the mammalian cerebral cortex from an undifferentiated brain as is observed in amphibians, depicting homology (but not ancestry) with the dorsal and lateral pallium of reptiles, and proposing a mechanism for the evolution of its laminated structure. A further line of research concerned the neural substrate for language and its gradual origin through natural selection, involving a large-scale neurocognitive network across temporal, parietal, and frontal cortices, which amplified vocal working memory capacity, facilitating to learn complex vocalizations and syntax development.