Robert Wurtz

Robert Henry Wurtz ( born March 28, 1936 in St. Louis, Missouri) is an American neurobiologist who is concerned with the neurobiology of vision and eye movements, which he studied mainly in monkeys.

Wurtz received in 1958 his bachelor's degree from Oberlin College in 1962 and his doctorate at the University of Michigan with James Olds in physiological psychology. As a post - graduate student, he was from 1962 to 1965 at Washington University ( about slow potential changes in the cerebral cortex ), 1965/66 at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke ( NINDS ) and was from 1966 to 1978, scientists at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH ), where he focused on synaptic plasticity of Aplysia and its preoccupation with the visual perception of monkeys began. During this time he was also a year visiting scientist at the Laboratory of Physiology, University of Cambridge. 1978-2002 he was the founding director of the Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research at the National Eye Institute.

He examined those involved in the various forms of eye movement brain processes and brain regions and precedes the part of the manufacturing process visual information of the initiation of eye movements. He also determined brain regions responsible for attention in the visual system and their shift from one object to another for the.

In 2010 he was awarded the Gruber Prize for Neuroscience and in 2006 he received the Ralph W. Gerard Prize -. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1988) and the Institute of Medicine (1997) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1990). 1990/91 he was president of the Society of Neuroscience.