Tranel named 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow

University of Iowa professor Daniel Tranel has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general-scientific society and publisher of the journal Science. Election as an AAAS fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers.

This year, 396 fellows have been recognized by AAAS for their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.

Daniel Tranel

As part of the Neuroscience Section, Tranel, a professor in the UI Departments of Neurology and Psychological and Brain Sciences, was selected for his distinguished contributions for behavioral and cognitive neuroscience, particularly for studies defining the neural correlates of emotion, word processing, and memory.

Tranel earned a doctorate from the UI in 1982 and also completed his postdoctoral research at the UI. He became a faculty member at the UI Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine in 1986 and has spent his entire career at the UI studying brain–behavior relationships in humans. In particular, his research is focused on defining neuropsychological and neuroanatomical correlates of complex human behavior, including visual recognition, face processing, verbal and nonverbal learning and retrieval, nonconscious cognitive processing, acquired disorders of social conduct, emotional processing, and decision-making.

Tranel’s research uses two main approaches to understand how different brain regions and circuits support complex cognition and behavior: the lesion method, which studies patients with brain damage (lesions) to determine how lesion sites are related to cognitive and behavioral deficits, and functional imaging, including PET and fMRI, to study brain activation in normal participants performing various tasks.

As a UI graduate student working with renowned neuroscientists Antonio and Hanna Damasio, Tranel helped establish the Iowa Neurological Patient Registry in 1982, a one-of-a-kind registry of patients who have experienced brain damage. Data from the registry have supported hundreds of studies examining how different regions of the brain are involved in emotion, memory, language, decision-making, and other complex behaviors. Tranel became registry director in 2005.

“I am deeply grateful to the stellar role models and mentors I was fortunate to have during my career, including Don Fowles, the Damasios, and Arthur Benton,” says Tranel, who also is a member of the Iowa Neuroscience Institute at the UI and associate dean for graduate and postdoctoral studies in the UI Carver College of Medicine. “I am also very grateful to my friend and colleague Nancy Andreasen, who has been a continual source of inspiration. And I have to add that my passion for science has always been fueled by my students, whose buoyant optimism and enthusiasm have energized me for decades. It is a privilege to be elected to an elite group of scientists in the AAAS.”

New fellows will be presented with an official certificate and a gold-and-blue (representing science and engineering, respectively) rosette pin on Saturday, Feb. 17, 2018, at the AAAS Fellows Forum during the 2018 AAAS annual meeting in Austin, Texas.