"When the BIAL Foundation funded our research in the past, this leveraged a number of important projects. But I feel especially honored now to be reviewing other people’s work as the president of the jury for the BIAL Award in Biomedicine.”
Ralph Adolphs was born in Germany in 1963 and studied at Stanford and Caltech, where he obtained his Ph.D. in Neurobiology in 1992. He subsequently conducted post-doctoral work with Antonio Damasio at the University of Iowa, and moved back to Caltech as Professor in 2004. He is the chair of Caltech’s Institutional Review Board for ethics review of human subjects research, and past director of the Caltech Brain Imaging Center.
His laboratory at Caltech studies human emotion and social cognition. Based on his initial studies of a rare patient with bilateral amygdala damage (patient S.M.), much of the work has focused on the amygdala and the neural networks with which it is connected. Current approaches span neuroimaging studies, single-unit recordings in neurosurgical patients, and studies in clinical populations including autism.
