John O'Keefe (neuroscientist)
| John O'Keefe | |
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O'Keefe in September 2014
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| Born |
November 18, 1939 New York City, New York |
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| Fields | Neuroscience |
| Institutions | University College London |
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| Thesis | Response properties of amygdalar units in the freely moving cat (1967) |
| Doctoral advisor | Ronald Melzack |
| Known for | Discovering place cells |
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Website www |
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John O'Keefe, FRS FMedSci (born November 18, 1939) is an American-British neuroscientist and a professor at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour and the Research Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at University College London. He is known for his discovery of place cells in the hippocampus and his discovery that they show a specific kind of temporal coding in the form of theta phase precession. In 2014, he received the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience "for the discovery of specialized brain networks for memory and cognition", together with Brenda Milner and Marcus Raichle. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014 together with May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser.
Born in New York City to Irish immigrant parents, O'Keefe attended Regis High School (Manhattan) and received a BA degree from the City College of New York. He went on to study at McGill University in Montreal, where he obtained an MA degree in 1964, and a PhD degree in Donald Hebb's Department of Psychology in 1967, supervised by Ronald Melzack. He originally went to University College London in 1967 as a US NIMH postdoctoral fellow working with the late Patrick Wall. He has been there ever since, and was awarded a professorship in 1987. He is a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom.
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