Dr. Dale Purves

Featured Author: Dale Purves

Dale Purves (b. March 11, 1938 in Philadelphia, PA, USA) received a B.A. from Yale University (CT, USA) in 1960 and an M.D. from the Harvard Medical School (MA, USA) in 1964. After a surgical internship, 2 years spent in Venezuela as a Peace Corps physician, and another year as an assistant resident at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Purves left medicine in favor of a career in neuroscience research. After postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Medical School and University College London (UK), he took a position of Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Washington University in St Louis (MO, USA) in 1973, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1976 and Full Professor in 1979. In 1990, Dr. Purves was appointed Chairman of the new Department of Neurobiology, Duke University (NC, USA) where he is the George Barth Geller Professor for Research in Neurobiology. Since 2003, he has been Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke.

Dr. Purves was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1988, to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1996, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. Over the course of his career he has received numerous awards for his research and teaching [1]. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Neuroscience (1988-1993), and has authored several monographs, edited two major textbooks and published numerous papers [2].

Current research in the Purves lab concerns auditory and visual perception focusing the neurobiological underpinnings of perceptual phenomena. The hypothesis driving this work is that visual and auditory percepts are generated according to a wholly empirical strategy, that represents in perception the empirical significance of sensory stimuli rather than their physical properties. For more information, see the award winning Purves lab website: http://www.purveslab.net/research/.

Scholarpedia articles:

Visual illusions: An Empirical Explanation. Scholarpedia, 3(6):3706