Jay A. Gottfried

Arthur H. Rubenstein University Professor

Jay Gottfried is a world-renowned neuroscientist with joint faculty appointments in the Department of Psychology in Penn Arts & Sciences and the Department of Neurology in the Perelman School of Medicine.

Gottfried’s research studies how the human brain translates perceptions into smells (e.g., the smell of a rose or a wet dog). He brings together a wide range of approaches and techniques—including physiological recordings, multivariate pattern analysis, and computational modeling—to understand how the brain encodes and stores odor information and how emotion, learning, and experience affect this perceptual and neural information.

Gottfried came to penn from the Weinberg School of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University. His award-winning work has been supported by multiple ongoing grants from the National Institutes of Health (among others) and published across such leading journals as ScienceNeuron, and the Journal of Neuroscience.

He held a three-year Neurology residency at Penn from 1998 to 2001, followed by a prestigious three-year fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at University College London, where he began his research in olfactory neuroscience and human neuroimaging. He earned an M.D. and Ph.D. in 1997 from New York University and a B.A. in Molecular Biology magna cum laude in 1989 from Princeton University.