Neal J. Cohen
Neal J. Cohen is a professor of psychology in the Cognitive Neuroscience division of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is appointed as a full-time faculty member in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois. He is the founding director of the Center for Nutrition, Learning, and Memory (CNLM), a partnership of the University of Illinois and Abbott Laboratories as of 2011. He is also the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Initiative (IHSI) at the University of Illinois, formed 2014. Cohen is known for his work on memory, amnesia, and learning, particularly his theories of multiple memory systems and the role of the hippocampus in relational memory. He is a co-author of Memory, Amnesia, and the Hippocampal System (1993) and From conditioning to conscious recollection: Memory systems of the brain (2001). Education and career Neal Jay Cohen is the son of Albert and Natalie Cohen. He attended the University of California, San Diego, where he became interested in amnesia and how memory and learning work. After working with Larry Squire, Cohen received his Ph.D. in 1981. He went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), first as a postdoctoral researcher, and then as a research scientist. While at MIT he worked with neuroscientist Suzanne Corkin. He then joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University, where he collaborated with Michael McCloskey. In 1990 Cohen joined the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he became the director of the Amnesia Research Laboratory. Cohen has collaborated extensively with Howard Eichenbaum. During "the first and only time during our collaboration that we were actually able to physically work together for any extended period of time", a leave that Cohen spent at Wellesley College, they began work on the book Memory, Amnesia, and the Hippocampal System (1993). They have since published another book, From conditioning to conscious recollection: Memory systems of the brain (2001). On December 19, 2011, it was announced that Neal Cohen would be the founding director of the Center for Nutrition, Learning, and Memory (CNLM), a multi-disciplinary institute for the study of nutrition, learning and memory, created through a partnership of the University of Illinois and Abbott Laboratories. It was said to be the first multi-disciplinary center for nutrition and cognition research in the world. On June 30, 2014, Neal Cohen was named the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Initiative (IHSI) at the University of Illinois. Cohen has been active in promoting and working to establish the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, proposed for the University of Illinois. He has served on the president's advisory task force, the committee to develop the new institution's core curriculum, and on the search committee to recruit the inaugural dean. Research Prior to the ground-breaking work of Brenda Milner, Suzanne Corkin and others studying the amnesiac patient Henry Molaison, researchers had assumed that memory was an emergent property of the cerebral cortex or brain as