William T. Greenough

William Tallant Greenough (October 11, 1944 – December 18, 2013) was a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Greenough was a pioneer in studies of neural development and brain plasticity. He studied learning and memory and the brain's responses to environmental enrichment, exercise, injury, and aging. He demonstrated that the brain continues to form new synaptic connections between nerve cells throughout life in response to environmental enrichment and learning. and has been described as "one of the towering figures in neuroscience".

Early life and education William Greenough was born in Seattle, Washington, on October 10, 1944. He later lived in Gearhart, Oregon and Seaside, Oregon.

In 1964, He chaired the psychology committee that helped to form the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois and became one of the Beckman Institute's first two half-time associate directors in the fall of 1987. He served as director of the Beckman Institute's Neuroscience Program from 1997–2000.

In 1998, Greenough was appointed to the Swanlund Endowed Chair in psychology. During his career, Greenough held a broad range of faculty appointments including psychology, psychiatry, bioengineering, cell and structural biology, and molecular and integrative physiology. He became interim director of the Center for Advanced Study in 2000, and was appointed its director in 2001. The book examines the history of research funding at American universities and the ways in which federal policy had changed. A shift from public to private sources of funding caused new challenges for universities, financially, strategically, and ethically.

Research Prior to Greenough's work, the prevalent belief was that the structure of the brain was determined very early in life and did not change substantially other than to degenerate as a result of damage due to injury, illness, or aging.

This view of brain structure, neural activity, and learning was completely overturned by Greenough's research. Moreover, changes occurred in areas of the brain that were associated with the performance of specific learned tasks. Learning and memory formation were therefore fundamentally related to ongoing synapse formation.

In addition to neurons, Greenough has reported sensitivity to experience in astrocytes and vasculature, studying processes within the brain including angiogenesis, myelination, the hypertrophy of astrocytic glial cells and the astrocyte ensheathment of neurons.

"Synapses when made seem to stay there for a long time in the development process," he said. "If you put an animal in a complex environment and take the animal out of it, you don't quickly take the complex environment out of the animal. There are limits, of course, but changes do stick around. Blood vessel changes, however, are very short lived. Synapses carry information that you may have had only one opportunity in life to acquire, whereas new blood vessels can be made in a few days."

In summary, Greenough's central contribution was the demonstration that brain development is influenced throughout life by factors such as the environment, exercise and lifelong learning. electron microscopy, electrophysiological studies and molecular approaches. Greenough's work is influential in developmental psychology, studies of brain aging and brain damage, learning and memory, neurology, psychiatry, and audiology. Fellow, American Psychological Association (APA), 1993 Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution, Society for Research in Child Development, 2003 Fragile X Foundation William Rosen Award for Outstanding Research, 1998 Oakley-Kunde Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Education, 1997 MERIT Award, National Institute of Mental Health, 1989 University Scholar of the University of Illinois, 1985–1988

Death Greenough suffered from Lewy body dementia and died on December 18, 2013, in Seattle, Washington.