Professor Michael Petrides

About the author

Michael Petrides is a James McGill Professor at the Montreal Neurological Institute, Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery and the Department of Psychology at McGill University. He obtained a B.Sc. in Experimental Psychology and a M.Sc. in Neurological Science from the University of London and then a Ph.D. in Behavioural Neuroscience from the University of Cambridge.  He subsequently worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Montreal Neurological Institute and as a research fellow at Harvard Medical School. The major aspect of Dr. Petrides’ research work is concerned with understanding the functional and anatomical organization of the primate frontal cortex. He has pursued this work in studies with patients who had excisions from the frontal cortex for the treatment of epilepsy, in studies on monkeys with selective lesions in particular parts of the frontal cortex, and in functional neuroimaging studies in healthy human participants. Based on this work he has proposed an influential theoretical framework to understand the functional organization of the lateral prefrontal cortex. Another aspect of his work has been the comparative cytoarchitectonic analysis of the human and the monkey prefrontal cortex that allows integration of research on nonhuman primates with research on the human brain.

Global Medical Discovery featured article: A unilateral medial frontal cortical lesion impairs trial and error learning without visual control