Wolfram Schultz

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

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.

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