Joaquin M. Fuster

Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences. Contributions to cognitive neuroscience that influence our understanding of perception and memory. First to record memory cells from the frontal cortex of awake, behaving monkeys. Analyzed cognitive functions of frontal cortex, emphasizing its role in executive functions, planning, and the organization of action. Work led to the now-dominant view that prefrontal cortex is part of a distributed network by which it exerts top-down control on sensory processing and exercises a broad role in cognitive control of behavior, language, and reasoning. Wrote The Prefrontal Cortex (2008, 4th ed). Honors include the Fyssen International Prize (2000) and the George Miller Prize, Cognitive Neuroscience Society (2007).