Jay A. Gottfried, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor of Neurology and Physiology

Cognitive Neurology & Alzheimer’s Disease Center
320 E. Superior St., Searle 11-453
Chicago, IL 60611
(312) 503-1834

Research Profile

Dr. Gottfried graduated from Princeton University with a major in Molecular Biology, and subsequently obtained his MD and PhD degrees at the New York University School of Medicine, with a neuroscience research focus on synaptic electrophysiology in rat hippocampal slices.  He then completed an internship at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, and a neurology residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In July 2001, Dr. Gottfried received a three-year Howard Hughes Medical Institute Physician-Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to study at the Functional Imaging Laboratory in the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, University College London, United Kingdom.  It was here that he first began to use imaging techniques to study olfaction, emotion, and learning in the human brain.  In September 2004 he moved to Chicago and was appointed Assistant Professor of Neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Psychology at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences (Evanston campus).  Dr. Gottfried is a faculty member of the Cognitive Neurology & Alzheimer’s Disease Center at Northwestern, where he sees patients with a variety of neurobehavioral and cognitive disorders resulting from neurodegenerative disease, stroke, and traumatic brain injury.  He also serves as Attending Physician on the Neurology Ward and Consult Services at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where he cares for general neurology patients.

In addition to his clinical activities, Dr. Gottfried is the principal investigator in a research laboratory devoted to characterizing the neurobiology of the human sense of smell.  Specifically, his laboratory investigates how odor quality (i.e., the character of a smell emanating from an odorous object, such as ‘mint,’ ‘rose,’ or ‘wet dog’) is encoded in the human brain.  His lab is also interested in clarifying the role of learning and experience in the formation and modulation of odor quality codes in olfactory cortex, and deciphering how odor perception follows from these coding schemes.  Based on the fact that the neuropathology of Alzheimer’s disease first accumulates in olfactory limbic areas of the brain, Dr. Gottfried’s long-term translational esearch objective is to develop novel imaging diagnostic biomarkers, prior to the onset of overt memory loss, as a means of identifying at-risk Alzheimer’s patients who would optimally benefit from therapeutic, and potentially curative, interventions.

• Li, W., Moallem, I., Paller, K.A., and Gottfried, J.A.  (2007).  Subliminal smells can guide social preferences.  Psychological Science (in press).
• Gottfried, J.A. (2007). What Can an Orbitofrontal Cortex-Endowed Animal Do with Smells? In: Linking Affect to Action: Critical Contributions of the Orbitofrontal Cortex., Eds. G. Schoenbaum, J.A. Gottfried, E.A. Murray, & S.J. Ramus, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, New York, NY, in press.
• Li, W., Luxenberg, E., Parrish, T., and Gottfried, J.A.  (2006).  Learning to smell the roses: experience-dependent neural plasticity in human piriform and orbitofrontal cortices.  Neuron 52: 1097-1108.
• Gottfried, J.A., Winston, J.S., & Dolan, R.J. (2006).  Dissociable codes of odor quality and odorant structure in human piriform cortex.  Neuron 49: 467-479.
• Gottfried, J.A., Small, D.M., & Zald, D.H.  (2006). Chapter 2: The Chemical Senses, in: The Orbitofrontal Cortex, Eds. D.H. Zald & S.L. Rauch (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 125-171.
• Winston, J.S., Gottfried, J.A., Kilner, J.M., & Dolan, R.J. (2005).  Integrated neural representations of odor intensity and affective valence in human amygdala.  Journal of Neuroscience 25: 8903-8907.
• Gottfried, J.A., & Zald, D.H. (2005).  On the scent of human olfactory orbitofrontal cortex: meta-analysis and comparison to non-human primates.  Brain Research Reviews 50: 287-304
• Gottfried, J.A.  (2005). A truffle in the mouth is worth two in the bush: odor localization in the human brain.  Neuron 47: 473-476.