John O'Keefe (neuroscientist)

John M. O'Keefe (* New York City ) is a British- American neuroscientist who is known for fundamental contributions to the role of the hippocampus in spatial orientation and memory. He is a professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London.

O'Keefe was born the son of Irish immigrants in New York and studied at the City College of New York ( bachelor's degree ). He then earned his doctorate under Ronald Melzack in physiological psychology at McGill University. His dissertation from 1967 was entitled Response properties of amygdalar units in the freely moving cat. As a post - graduate student, he was from 1967 at University College London, then at Patrick Wall. He remained there and became professor in 1987.

It deals with the neural basis of specifically spatial orientation and spatial memory and the function that the hippocampus is doing. He showed how location information is stored in neural networks of the hippocampus and that there are neurons in the hippocampus, which are responsible for a certain location information ( Place Cells ). He developed a theoretical model of the memory function of the hippocampus, that he checked experimentally in rodents and humans. In 1978, an influential book to him and Lynn Nadel. He also dealt with the typical case of Alzheimer 's disease deficits in the hippocampus.

He showed that location information is not coded only in the repetition rate of neuronal signals, but also to the phase information ( the example of the action potential of the pyramidal cells of the relative phase of the theta rhythm of the EEG is important). It also deals with navigation of robots, neural networks and the use of virtual reality in computer visualizations of the brain.

In 2008 he was awarded the Gruber Prize for Neuroscience and the European Neuroscience Journal Award and in 2007 the British Neuroscience Association Award, 2001 Feldberg Prize and 2006 Grawemeyer Award in Psychology with Lynn Nadel. In 2013 he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize -. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences.

It has both the British and the American citizen. He is married to Eileen O'Keefe (Professor of Public Health ) and the couple have two sons.

Writings

• Editor with N. Burgess, KJ Jeffery The hippocampal and parietal foundations of spatial cognition, Oxford University Press 1998
• Editor with P. Andersen, R. Morris, D. Amaral, T. Bliss The hippocampus book, Oxford University Press 2007
• With Lynn Nadel: The hippocampus as a cognitive map, Oxford University Press 1978 website with this online copy