Dr. Wolfram Schultz

Featured Author: Wolfram Schultz

Scholarpedia articles:

Reward , Scholarpedia, 2(3):1652. (2007)

Reward signals , Scholarpedia, 2(6):2184. (2007)

Wolfram Schultz is Professor of Neuroscience, Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, Wellcome Principal Research Fellow at Cambridge University, UK. He graduated in medicine from the University of Heidelberg, Germany and did his postdoctoral training in Germany, the US and Sweden. Wolfram Schultz was a Professor of Neurophysiology at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland and moved in 2001 to the University of Cambridge, UK.

During his carrer he obtained a number of major awards, among them the 1984 Ellermann Price of the Swiss Societies for Neurology, Neurosurgery and Neuropathology. In 1997 he was awarded the Theodore-Ott-Price of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences (shared). Moreover he was awarded the Golden Brain Award of the Minerva Foundation, California, US in 2002. In 2005 he was awarded the Ipsen Prize 2005 for Neuronal Plasticity (shared). Furthermore he served as a member on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Neurophysiology since 1997 and was the Receiving Editor for the European Journal of Neuroscience from 1998 till 2003.

Wolfram Schultz is an authority on the brain's "reward systems". His laboratory has conducted important studies documenting the reward functions of dopamine neurons and of neurons in other parts of the brain's reward system. His work concerns the processing of reward information and uncertainty in the brain in relation to learning theory and microeconomics. His group combines neurophysiological, imaging and behavioral techniques to investigate the neural correlates of goal-directed behavior. They are interested in outcome value (in particular reward) signals in specific brain structures such as dopamine neurons, striatum, frontal cortex and amygdala. These rapid, global, evaluative and supervising neural signals may play a role in learning, decision-making and choice behavior. In investigating these outcome-coding mechanisms they try to establish a common biological basis for animal learning theory, microeconomic utility theory, and behavioral ecology.

For more information, visit http://www.pdn.cam.ac.uk/staff/schultz/.

(Author profile by Nikos Green)