Francisco Gonzalez-Lima
Professor — Ph.D., University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine
George I. Sanchez Centennial Professorship
Contact
- E-mail: gonzalezlima@utexas.edu
- Phone: (512) 471-5895
- Office: SEA 3.236
- Campus Mail Code: A8000
Interests
Neuroscience, neuroanatomy, neurobiology, physiological psychology, psychobiology, learning and memory, brain energy modulation, and neural mechanisms of behavior
Biography
Higher Education and Mentors
An honors graduate of Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, Francisco Gonzalez-Lima received a B.S. in Biology in 1976 and a B.A. in Psychology in 1977. His Honors Thesis was supervised by Drs. Janis L. Dunlap, Arnold A. Gerall and Joan C. King. Dr. King’s teachings, in particular, motivated him to study the brain. During his last summer at Tulane he worked in the neuroendocrinology laboratory of Dr. Andrew V. Schally, who later that year earned a Nobel Prize. The enriching research experiences at Tulane convinced him to pursue a research career. While being recruited to continue studies at Tulane, he met Dr. Sven O.E. Ebbesson, a former Tulane neuroanatomy professor, who recruited him in a visit to Puerto Rico where Dr. Ebbesson was the new director of the medical sciences graduate program. In 1980 he received a Ph.D. in Anatomy and Neurobiology from the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine, San Juan. Dr. Gonzalez-Lima was introduced to electrophysiology by Dr. Jose del Castillo, director of the Laboratory of Neurobiology, co-discoverer of quantum transmitter release (del Castillo and Katz--that led to a Nobel Prize to Katz), and a disciple of the Spanish school of Santiago Ramon y Cajal, founding father of modern neuroscience. Dr. Gonzalez-Lima’s research philosophy from thereon has been inspired by their example. His doctoral dissertation utilized electrophysiological recording of single cells and electrical stimulation of the brain and was supervised by Drs. James J. Keene, Jose del Castillo, Earl Kicliter, Hilda Lopez and Walter L. Stiehl.
Faculty Beginnings and Humboldt Fellowship
At the age of 24, Dr. Gonzalez-Lima was appointed Assistant Professor of Anatomy at the newly formed Ponce School of Medicine, Ponce, Puerto Rico. He became part of the founding faculty that developed the curriculum and laboratories that brought U.S. accreditation to this medical school in 1980. He taught under the guidance of Dr. Walter L. Stiehl, director of the Department of Anatomy, who became his beloved mentor and research collaborator. Their most important work was published in a series of papers in the European Journal of Pharmacology. In 1981 he met the German Professor Henning Scheich in a study at the Caribbean Primate Research Center involving the newly developed 2-deoxyglucose autoradiographic method. Dr. Gonzalez-Lima was fascinated by the power of the neuroimaging approach to brain research and proposed an ambitious collaborative research project to Dr. Scheich. His resourceful work in the primate study led Dr. Scheich to invite him to go to Germany and sponsored his application to the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Special arrangements were made with Ponce School of Medicine so that Dr. Gonzalez-Lima could pursue postdoctoral research training in Germany as a Humboldt Research Fellow in 1982-83. This period in Germany at the Technical University of Darmstadt was a productive career experience that led to a very successful series of studies published mainly in Brain Research. After returning from Germany in 1983, Dr. Gonzalez-Lima was promoted to Associate Professor. His fruitful collaboration with Professor Scheich continued in follow-up trips to Germany sponsored by the German Science Foundation (DFG), in August-October 1984, October-December 1985 and August-September 1989. Their pioneering studies in animals, using a brain marker known as fluorodeoxyglucose or FDG, contributed for developing the FDG neuroimaging method in humans using positron emission tomography.
Texas Centennial Professorship and Consortium
At the Cajal Conference on Neurobiology in Madrid, Spain, September 1984, Dr. Gonzalez-Lima met Texas professors who were impressed by his brain research with FDG autoradiography. He was recruited to the new College of Medicine of Texas A&M University, where he became Assistant Professor in the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology in January 1986. After he was recommended for promotion in 1989, the University of Texas at Austin recruited Dr. Gonzalez-Lima and he joined the new Institute for Neuroscience and the Department of Psychology as Associate Professor with tenure in January 1991. Dr. Gonzalez-Lima started an exciting revolution in brain metabolic mapping of learning functions, publishing the first neuroimaging studies of Pavlovian conditioning, behavioral habituation and sensitization, and the first book on brain imaging of learning and behavioral functions (Gonzalez-Lima et al, NATO ASI Vol. D68, 1992). This book was based on the first international conference on this topic that he organized with sponsorship from NATO and NSF. In 1992, his graduate student A. R. McIntosh and he published a report of the first application of structural equation modeling to neuroscience. This led to a series of pioneering papers on the use of path analysis in neuroimaging that culminated in them organizing an international symposium and the first edited volume on this subject (Gonzalez-Lima and McIntosh, Human Brain Mapping Vol. 2, 1994). After 1992, Dr. Gonzalez-Lima and his trainees published a series of studies with their new cytochrome oxidase method, the first enzyme histochemistry method allowing full quantification in terms of calibrated activity units. This approach led to numerous successful studies of cerebral energy metabolic capacity in various species and in Alzheimer’s disease patients, and to the organization of an international symposium and the first book on this subject (Gonzalez-Lima, 1998). In 1997 Dr. Gonzalez-Lima became Professor and Head of Behavioral Neuroscience, and in several years built this area by recruiting four new assistant professors. In 1999 he received joint appointments as Professor in the Division of Pharmacology and Toxicology. In 2000 Dr. Gonzalez-Lima received offers to become director of two neuroscience centers, but he stayed at Austin where he was honored with the first endowed chair named after a Hispanic professor in the USA, the George I. Sanchez Centennial Professorship in Liberal Arts and Sciences. In 2002 Dr. Gonzalez-Lima became Director of the Texas Consortium in Behavioral Neuroscience, a multi-million dollar doctoral and postdoctoral research training consortium of five Texas universities. Dr. Gonzalez-Lima has been an invited lecturer at over a hundred institutions (in Europe, USA, Canada, Latin America and Asia) and has served on national and international scientific advisory committees (most recently at the International Affairs Committee of the Society for Neuroscience and US National Academy of Science Committee to the International Brain Research Organization). In 2007 he was honored with the Distinguished Alumnus Award from his alma mater. In 2012 Dr. Gonzalez-Lima became the founding Chair of the Neuroscience section of the Texas Academy of Science and US Councilor of the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society. His laboratory has been at the forefront of neurometabolic studies of animal behavioral functions in the world, translating new interventions for human behavioral disorders and contributing over 300 scientific publications (in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings and books).
