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Dale Purves

Dale Purves is 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 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 1968-71 and in the Department of Biophysics, University College London, from 1971-73. He then accepted a faculty position 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 came to Duke in 1990 as the founding chair of the Department of Neurobiology, where he became increasingly interested in cognitive neuroscience. Purves' work at Duke has focused on visual and auditory perception (music), exploring the hypothesis that, as a means of contending with the inverse problem, percepts are generated by a neural strategy that represents the empirical significance of sensory stimuli rather than their physical features.
For more information about his work and research, visit Dale Purves laboratory.