Ranulfo Romo

Dr. Ranulfo Romo is Professor of Neuroscience at the Institute of Cellular Physiology, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Romo has greatly advanced our understanding of how the brain generates sensations and then converts them into perceptions, memories, and decisions. In series of influential studies, Romo and his colleagues studied neuronal activity in the primary somatosensory cortex of trained monkeys while the monkeys discriminated between two consecutive mechanical vibrations applied to their fingertips. Romo his colleagues found that the neuronal discharges observed in the somatosensory cortex correlated closely with the monkeys’ ability to discriminate between the stimuli applied to their fingertips. Using this data, the group was able to show that electrical stimulation to these same cortical neurons could produce the same firing pattern, leading the monkeys to have the same discriminatory response as they did in response to mechanical stimuli on their fingertips. This meant that the monkeys were “feeling” the electrical impulses to their brains in the same manner as they did physical touch on their fingertips. This type of discrimination between two different sensory stimuli is a protocol used in many of Romo’s experiments, and requires evaluating current sensory information in reference to information stored in memory. A central and ongoing question of Romo’s work therefore asks: where in the brain is the memory of the first sensory stimulus, how is it stored, and how is the second stimulus processed in relation to this? Romo has been able to discover that neurons of the parietal and frontal lobe cortices underlie the various stages of the discrimination process, including the representation of current and remembered sensory inputs, their comparison, and the generation of the motor command expressing the result. Romo has received numerous accolades for his research, including the 1990 Demuth Prize in Neuroscience from the Swiss Medical Research Foundation, the 2000 National Prize in Sciences and Arts from the Mexican government, the 2002 Prize in Basic Medical Sciences from the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS), the 2008 Mexico City Prize in Basic Sciences, and the 2009 Ranwell Caputto prize from the Argentinean Society of Neuroscience. In addition to his American Academy of Arts and Sciences membership, Romo is a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences, a member of the Neurosciences Research Program, and a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. His publications appear in Journal of Neurophysiology, Nature, Neuron, Neuroscience, and Science.