Alan R. Gibson
Alan Gibson was born on July 1, 1943, in New York, NY, and graduated from Dartmouth College in 1965. He earned his PhD in Psychology from New York University working with Michael Gazzaniga. Alan and Dr. Gazzaniga studied split-brain patients, i.e., patients with seizure disorders treated by surgery that cut the connections between the two cerebral cortices.
After graduate school, Alan joined Mitchell Glickstein’s laboratory at Brown University. There he studied input to the cerebellum from visual cortex. After Brown, Alan worked at UC Davis before joining James Houk’s laboratory at the Northwestern University medical school. There he studied the inferior olive and the cerebellum’s connections to the spinal cord through the red nucleus. After Northwestern, Alan joined the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix where he became the Chair of Behavioral Neuroscience.
Alan was innovative in the laboratory and shared his techniques freely. Alan’s rare talent, good will, and generosity improved the research of his students and collaborators.
Alan was particularly interested in the brain circuitry that controls arm movements. In his last work, an introduction to his next but unfinished paper, he argues that previous work indicates that the pyramidal tract is not the most influential pathway through which the motor cortex controls arm reaching movements. He proposes that the cortical output to the cerebellum guides reaching movements via the cerebellum’s output to the lateral vestibular nucleus.
Read Alan’s reasoning in the introduction to his unfinished paper on the pathway from motor cortex to the spinal cord through the cerebellum and the lateral vestibular nucleus.
