Michael Rugg obtained his BSc and PhD in psychology from the University of Leicester, UK. Following a postdoctoral year at the University of York, in 1979 he was appointed to a lectureship in psychology at the University of St Andrews, where he went on to become Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Department. In 1998 he moved to the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London as Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow, where he remained until 2003, when he moved to the University of California, Irvine as a Professor of Neurobiology and director of The Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. In 2011 he moved to the University of Texas, Dallas as Distinguished Chair in Behavioral and Brain Sciences and is currently director of UTD’s Center for Vital Longevity. He also has fractional professorial appointments in the department of psychiatry, UTSW Medical Center and the department of psychology, University of East Anglia in the UK.

Professional recognition includes Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Association for Psychological Science. He is past-chair of the Cognition and Perception study section of the Center for Scientific Review, National Institutes of Health, and current chair of the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory study section.

Dr Rugg’s principal research interests are in the cognitive neuroscience of human memory, and how and why memory is affected as we age and as a result of disease, especially diseases of old age. He uses functional neuroimaging, electroencephalography and transcranial magnetic stimulation to identify the neural regions and the patterning of their functional activity that allow memories to be acquired and retrieved. His research addresses fundamental questions about how we learn and remember, and translational issues such as identifying people most at risk of developing disorders of memory in later life. Currently funded research projects focus of the neural mechanisms of memory encoding and retrieval, and on the brain basis of individual differences in memory function across the lifespan.