Wolfram Schultz
About
Wolfram Schultz FRS is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge and a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow, renowned for his groundbreaking discovery that dopamine neurons encode reward prediction errors—a foundational insight linking neuroscience with reinforcement learning and economic decision theory. After earning his medical degree from the University of Heidelberg and a PhD in physiology from the University of Fribourg, he conducted postdoctoral research in Germany, the USA, and Sweden. Schultz's research focuses on how the brain processes reward, utility, risk, and decision-making, with particular attention to dopamine neurons, the striatum, orbitofrontal cortex, and amygdala. His work has significantly advanced the fields of neuroeconomics and computational neuroscience, earning him prestigious honors such as the Brain Prize, the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience, and election as a Fellow of the Royal Society. Read more