Daniel T. Tranel, PhD
Professor
Neuroscience Ph.D. Program Director
Department
Neurology
Psychological & Brain Sciences
Biography
My research is aimed at understanding brain-behavior relationships in humans, at systems level. Two main approaches are used:
- the lesion method, in which brain-damaged patients are studied with neuropsychological procedures to determine how certain lesion sites are related to certain cognitive and behavioral deficits
- functional imaging, including PET and fMRI, in which the brain activation in normal subjects is measured while the subjects are performing various tasks.
Specific topics that I am working on currently include: retrieval of conceptual knowledge; retrieval of words and lexical knowledge; emotion and decision-making; face processing; nonconscious processing; acquired disorders of social conduct; memory; psychophysiology. My research has been continuously and fully funded for two decades. I have about a thousand square feet of laboratory space in the Department of Neurology in the University of Iowa Hospitals.
Research areas
- Cognitive neuroscience
- Clinical neuroscience
- Brain trauma
- Epilepsy/Seizures
- Alzheimer's Disease
- Neurodegenerative disorders
- Memory
- Frontal cortex
- Hippocampus
- Amygdala
- Memory loss
- Learning
- Fear learning
- Limbic System
- Neuroimaging
- Neural networks modeling