David Amaral
David Gil Amaral is a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Davis, United States, and since 1998 has been the research director at the M.I.N.D. Institute, an affiliate of UC Davis, engaged in interdisciplinary research into the causes and treatment of autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders. Amaral joined the UC Davis faculty as a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and the Center for Neuroscience and as an investigator at the California Regional Primate Research Center in 1991. Since 1995, he has been a professor of psychiatry in the UC Davis School of Medicine, with an appointment to the UC Davis .
Education
In 1972, Amaral earned his bachelor's degree in psychology from Northwestern University, and in 1977 his PhD in neurobiology and psychology at the University of Rochester. From 1977 to 1980, Amaral was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow with Dr. W. Maxwell Cowan at the Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology, Washington University School of Medicine.Research
Amaral studies the organization and functioning of the hippocampus, the amygdala and other parts of the primate and human brain. Amaral has directed several million dollars' worth of research with grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, which has included primate research investigations on the function of the amygdala, a brain region associated with emotion processing. Amaral investigated "Postmortem Neuroanatomical Evaluation of the Amygdaloid Complex in Autism". His earlier studies detected alterations in the amygdala, which some have speculated underlies the social and emotional abnormalities in autism.Amaral's awards include the McKnight Foundation Scholars Award, 1981, the Sloan Foundation Fellow, 1983, and the National Institute of Mental Health Merit Award, 1989 and 1993. He is the first holder of the Beneto Foundation Chair, an endowed position at UC Davis created by the Beneto Foundation of Sacramento. Amaral was the President of the International Society for Autism Research and since 2015 is the editor-in-chief of the society's journal Autism Research. In 2019, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.