Paul Adams

Who is Paul Adams?

Paul Richard Adams, FRS is a neurobiologist currently serving as a Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Stony Brook University in New York.

He graduated from London University with a PhD, and 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 an MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellow in 1986, and elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society 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, which now play central roles in neuroscience. He is now working on a theory about the neocortex, centering on the idea that the key to sophisticated learning is extremely specific synaptic strength adjustment.