Paul Richard Adams,
FRS is a neuroscientist currently serving as a Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at
Stony Brook University in
New York.
He graduated from
London University
The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree- ...
with a PhD, and did postdoctoral work with
Bert Sakmann at the
Max Planck Institute.
He won the Novartis Memorial Prize in 1979 and the Gaddum Memorial Award in 1984, both from the British Pharmacological Society. He was made a
MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellow in 1986, and elected as a
Fellow of the Royal Society
Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the judges of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathemat ...
in 1991. From 1987 to 1995 he was an investigator at the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
With others, he pioneered the concepts of
open channel block and
neuromodulation
Neuromodulation is the physiological process by which a given neuron uses one or more chemicals to regulate diverse populations of neurons. Neuromodulators typically bind to metabotropic, G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) to initiate a second ...
, which now play central roles in neuroscience. He is now working on a theory about the neocortex, centering on the idea that sophisticated learning requires extremely specific synaptic strength adjustments. He (working with Kingsley Cox) has proposed that this problem could be overcome, in the neocortex, by a process called “Hebbian proofreading”, using some neurons (e.g. in layer 6) as detectors of correlated activity between other neurons (e.g. in thalamus and upper layers), which then edit recent plasticity at the corresponding thalamocortical synapses.
[Adams, P. R., and K. J. A. Cox. "A neurobiological perspective on building intelligent devices." Neuromorphic Eng 3.1 (2006): 2-8.]
Patents
Neuromorphic Device for Proofreading Connection Adjustments in Hardware Artificial Neural Networks
References
External links
Adams's page at Stony Brook's Pharmacology site
Fellows of the Royal Society
Stony Brook University faculty
MacArthur Fellows
Howard Hughes Medical Investigators
Alumni of the University of London
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)
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