Neuroscientist, Author
"Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: Stress, Disease, and Coping -- Stress and Where Stress-Related
Diseases Come From"
Tuesday, November 7, 2006, 11:10 a.m.
Robert Sapolsky is the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biology and a Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University. A MacArthur "Genius" Fellow, he also serves as a research associate with the Institute of Primate Research at the National Museum of Kenya. For more than two decades, he has traveled to the Serengeti of East Africa to study a population of wild baboons and the relationship between personality and patterns of stress-related disease. A neuroendocrinologist by training, his research has focused on the causes of stress and neuron degeneration, and the potential of gene therapy strategies in protecting humans from disease.
He is the author of Stress, the Aging Brain, and the Mechanisms of Neuron Death; The Trouble with Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament; Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: An Updated Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases and Coping; and, most recently, a new collection of essays, Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on our Lives as Animals (Simon and Schuster, August 2005). In commenting on his book A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life among the Baboons, recounting his early years as a field biologist, a New York Times review stated, "If you crossed Jane Goodall with a borscht-belt comedian, she might have written a book like A Primate’s Memoir."
A regular contributor to popular periodicals such as Discover magazine and The New Yorker, he lectures widely on such diverse topics as stress and stress-related diseases, a biology of religious belief, baboons, the biology of memory, schizophrenia, depression, aggression, and Alzheimer's Disease. Author of numerous science articles, he has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychoneuroendocrinology, and Stress and as a contributing editor for The Sciences.
Read the Press Release: Noted Neuroscientist, Naturalist Discusses Stress, Disease in Lawrence University Convocation