Lee Lovejoy, MD, PhD, originally from New Orleans, attended Tulane University and received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biomedical engineering. At Tulane he studied chaotic and nonlinear dynamics in dopaminergic neurons of the substantia nigra in an effort to understand the extent to which seemingly random activity of neurons was a reflection of internal dynamics versus external input. He then joined the medical scientist training program at the University of California San Diego. There he received his MD and PhD in neurosciences. In his dissertation work, published in Nature Neuroscience, he showed that neural circuitry in the superior colliculus, a brainstem structure normally associated with eye movement control, was necessary for selecting visual information that gave rise to perception. Dr. Lovejoy now continues his work on primate decision-making in the laboratory of Dr. Daniel Salzman, with a new focus on how populations of cortical neurons represent and select abstract information for those decisions. He concurrently maintains his practice in psychiatry.
