Dale Purves

Who is Dale Purves?

Dale Purves is Director of the Neuroscience and Behavioural Disorders program at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School and Executive Director of the Neuroscience Research Partnership at A*STAR, both located in Singapore. Until 2009 he was Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and George Barth Geller Professor for Research in Neurobiology at Duke University. He received a B.A. from Yale University in 1960 and an M.D. from the Harvard Medical School in 1964. After several years in clinical medicine as a surgical house officer at the Massachusetts General Hospital and as a Peace Corps Physician, he gave up medicine in favor of a career in neuroscience research. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard from 1968 to 1971 and in the Department of Biophysics, University College London, from 1971 to 1973. He then joined the faculty in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the Washington University in 1971, where he remained until 1990. During that time he studied the development of the nervous system, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1989. He arrived at Duke in 1990 as the founding chair of the Department of Neurobiology, where he became increasingly interested in cognitive neuroscience.