Wolfram Schultz M.D. FRS

Wolfram Schultz MD, FRS (Fellowship of the Royal Society), is Professor of Neuroscience, in the Departments of Physiology, Development, and Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, School of the Biological Sciences, a visiting research Associate with California Institute of Technology, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow. Wolfram conducts research out of the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, which studies neural signals that play a role in decision-making and choice behavior. In 2017 Dr. Schultz together with Peter Dayan and Ray Dolan won the world’s most valuable prize for brain research for their analysis of how the brain recognizes and processes reward.

What Wolfram knows that matters to you: Dopamine neurons are big fat cells that track threats and rewards in your environment at a timescale of hundreds of a second. They predict if the threat or reward will happen to you, and trigger actions that bring you closer to reward, and further from threat. We don’t know these processes are happening even though they help drive our behaviors and ultimately our survival.