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R. Douglas Fields, Ph.D.
R. Douglas Fields is the Chief of the Section on Nervous System Development and Plasticity at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and author of The Other Brain., a book about glia written for the general audience and published by Simon and Schuster. He founded the scientific journal Neuron Glia Biology and served as Editor-in-Chief from 2004-2012, and serves as scientific advisor to Scientific American Mind and Odyssey magazines. Dr. Fields received advanced degrees at UC Berkeley, San Jose State University, UC San Diego, and he held postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford University, Yale University, and the National Institutes of Health before starting his research laboratory at the NIH in 1994. Dr. Fields' scientific research investigates how nervous system development is regulated by neural impulse activity in fetal development and by functional experience in postnatal life, with an emphasis on studies of neuron-glia interactions and the cellular/molecular mechanisms of memory.