Wolfram Schultz
British-European professor of neuroscience
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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 in 2001, where he is Professor of Neuroscience (and has been Wellcome Principal Research Fellow from 2001 to 2023).
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Research
During the 1980s and 1990s, Schultz was experimenting with macaque monkeys when he found that dopamine neurons in their basal ganglia 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
- 2019: Karl Spencer Lashley Award
- 2018: Gruber Prize in Neuroscience
- 2017: The Brain Prize
- 2002: Golden Brain Award
Professor Schultz 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.