Rate My Professor Ralph Adolphs

Ralph Adolphs is the Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Stanford University in 1986 and his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1993. After completing postdoctoral training at the University of Iowa from 1993 to 1997 under Antonio Damasio, where he studied lesion patients, Adolphs joined the faculty at Iowa before relocating to Caltech in 2004. There, he was appointed Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience (2004-2005), became Bren Professor in 2005, and served as Professor of Biology from 2005 to 2017. Additional leadership roles include Davis Leadership Chair (2017-2021), Director of the Caltech Brain Imaging Center (2008-2013 and 2017-2021), and an adjunct appointment in the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa.

Director of the Adolphs Lab, Adolphs investigates the neural and psychological mechanisms underlying human social behavior. His research focuses on how people recognize, perceive, and process emotions and other social cues in facial expressions, make social and moral judgments, form emotionally charged decisions, and understand social impairments in autism and Williams syndrome. The lab utilizes functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), eye tracking, electrical recordings from brain cells, and studies neurological patients with focal lesions, neuropsychiatric disorders, and neurosurgical implants. Adolphs' contributions have been honored with awards such as the Distinguished Investigator Award from the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (2013), Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (2010), President of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (2011), ASCIT Award for Excellence in Mentoring Research from Caltech (2007), NARSAD Distinguished Investigator Award (2005), James S. McDonnell Foundation "21st Century Science" Award (2002), Klingenstein Award in the Neurosciences (2000), and EJLB Foundation Scholar Research Award (1998). He received a $10 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health in 2012 to establish the Caltech Conte Center. With nearly 95,000 citations, his influential publications include "The Human Amygdala and Emotion" (1999), "Perception and Emotion" (2006), and recent work like "Mapping effective connectivity of human amygdala subdivisions with intracranial stimulation" (Nature Communications, 2022).