Rate My Professor Ralph Adolphs

Director of the Adolphs Lab, Adolphs investigates the neural and psychological mechanisms underlying human social behavior. His research focuses on how people recognize, perceive, and process emotions and other social cues in facial expressions, make social and moral judgments, form emotionally charged decisions, and understand social impairments in autism and Williams syndrome. The lab utilizes functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), eye tracking, electrical recordings from brain cells, and studies neurological patients with focal lesions, neuropsychiatric disorders, and neurosurgical implants. Adolphs' contributions have been honored with awards such as the Distinguished Investigator Award from the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (2013), Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (2010), President of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (2011), ASCIT Award for Excellence in Mentoring Research from Caltech (2007), NARSAD Distinguished Investigator Award (2005), James S. McDonnell Foundation "21st Century Science" Award (2002), Klingenstein Award in the Neurosciences (2000), and EJLB Foundation Scholar Research Award (1998). He received a $10 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health in 2012 to establish the Caltech Conte Center. With nearly 95,000 citations, his influential publications include "The Human Amygdala and Emotion" (1999), "Perception and Emotion" (2006), and recent work like "Mapping effective connectivity of human amygdala subdivisions with intracranial stimulation" (Nature Communications, 2022).