Hanna Damásio

Hanna Damasio is Dana Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience and Professor of Psychology and Neurology at the University of Southern California. She is also an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.

Until 2005, she was a Distinguished Professor of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, where she directed the Human Neuroanatomy and Neuroimaging Laboratory. Using computerized tomography and magnetic resonance scanning, she developed methods of investigating human brain structure and studied functions such as language, memory, and emotion, using both the lesion method and functional neuroimaging.

Damasio received an M.D. from the University of Lisbon Medical School in 1969. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Neurological Association. Damasio recently shared the Signoret Prize in cognitive neuroscience with António Damásio for their pioneering work in social cognition. She holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Lisbon and Aachen. She is married to António Damásio, an internationally-renowned neurologist and expert in the relationship between emotion and cognition, with whom she co-directs the Dana and David Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center and the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC.