C. Daniel Salzman turned to neuroscience while a medical student at Stanford University. He joined Bill Newsome’s lab at Stanford and investigated the neural basis of perceptual decision making. His Ph.D. thesis provided causal evidence linking the activity of physiologically classified neurons in visual cortex with perceptual judgments. For this work, Dr. Salzman received the Donald B. Lindsley Prize from the Society for Neuroscience. After graduating from Stanford with his M.D. and Ph.D., Dr. Salzman returned to the clinical arena, completing an internship and residency in psychiatry, both at Stanford University Hospital. He then resumed his research career, developing his program that combines electrophysiological and behavioral experiments to understand brain structures involved in psychiatric disorders. Two years after completing his clinical residency, Dr. Salzman joined the faculty at Columbia in the Department of Psychiatry and in the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, which is now the Department of Neuroscience. His current research focuses on investigating the neural circuits that represent emotions, that underlie how emotions influence cognitive functions and that mediate the cognitive regulation of emotion.
Current Project: Neural mechanisms of context dependent cognitive behavior
Past Project: Computational principles of mechanisms underlying cognitive functions