Nick Spitzer received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and University College, London. He joined the faculty in 1972 and has been the recipient of a Sloan Fellowship, a Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and co-director of the UCSD Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind.