José L. Contreras-Vidal, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Behavioral and Computational Neuroscience

EDUCATION

Dr. Contreras-Vidal earned his Engineer's degree in Electronics and Communications in 1987 from Monterrey Institute of Technology (Mexico), his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering in 1990 from the University of Colorado at Boulder and his Ph.D. in Cognitive and Neural Systems in 1994 at Boston University with Prof. Daniel Bullock. His Ph.D. work focused on a large-scale, biologically-plausible neural network of cortico-spinal-cerebellar dynamics. He went on to do his postdoctoral work with Prof. George Stelmach at Arizona State University in Parkinson's disease and Prof. Wolfram Schultz at the University of Fribourg on modeling of the dopamine system. In the Fall 1999, Dr. Contreras-Vidal joined the faculty of the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Maryland-College Park, where is now also in the faculty of the Graduate Programs in Bioengineering and Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS).

AWARDS:

1993 Fellow, Instituto Iberoamericano, Spain.

1993 Fellowship, Fondation Fyssen, Paris, France (FF$100,000). Declined.

1994 Fellow, NATO Workshop on Sensorimotor Control of Movement, Trieste, Italy.

1995 Fellow, Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP).

1996 Research Scholar, Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, Dirección General de
Investigación Cientifica y Ensenanza Superior, Spain.

2000 Fellow, International Brain Research Organization-Institut National de la Santé et
de la Recherche Médicale (IBRO-INSERM).

2006 Senior Research Fellow, City of Paris, France.