Dr. Peter Shizgal

Concordia University Research Chair in Psychology (Tier 1)
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts and Science

Centre for Studies in Behavioral Neurobiology
peter.shizgal

A native of Montreal, Dr. Peter Shizgal remained in his home city to obtain his B.A. in Psychology at McGill University, moving to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia for his graduate and doctoral studies in Physiological Psychology. He returned to Montreal to become a Lecturer at Concordia in 1975 and became a faculty member the following year.

Dr. Shizgal is a past Director of the Centre for Studies in Behavioural Neurobiology (CSBN) and holds memberships in seven professional associations and learned societies. He and his research team are enthusiastically pursuing current projects on the neural basis of reward, motivation, and decision-making. Key areas of interest they are looking at include: the role of dopamine in the pursuit of reward, the characterization and identification of brain reward circuitry, the mathematical modeling of how the cost, strength, risk, and delay of reward contribute to the selection and pursuit of goals, the psychophysical inference of opportunity costs, and the mapping neural correlates of hedonic states in humans by means of functional neuroimaging.

During the thirty year period that Dr. Shizgal has been working at Concordia, he has achieved considerable success as a researcher. Some of his more significant accomplishments include:

• Receiving several prestigious awards and honours including being elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007, Fellow of the American Psychological Society in 1994, and Fellow of the American Psychological Association in 1986; being awarded a Concordia University Research Chair in 2001; receiving the NutraSweet Prize, for research in nutrition and feeding, in 1994; and being awarded the Concordia University John W. O'Brien Distinguished Teaching Award in 1985.
• Participating in the establishment of a new hybrid discipline called 'neuroeconomics.'
• Developing quantitative models of goal evaluation, selection, and pursuit.
• Collaborating on the first study to apply decision theory in functional brain imaging.
• Collaborating on the first study to tie leptin, a hormone that informs the brain about fat stores, to brain reward circuitry.
• Developing and applying behavioural methods for inferring physiological and anatomical properties of reward-related neurons.
• Participating in the founding of CSBN, one of the top research centres of its kind in the world, as well as Concordia's Science College.