Nationally renowned psychologist and neuroscience scholar Anthony Wagner will deliver the inaugural Weaver Distinguished Lecture in Law, Brain Sciences, and Behavior in The Moore Room at Vanderbilt Law School from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 21.
Wagner’s lecture is titled “Explorations in Law and Neuroscience: Memory States in the Brain.” He is deputy director of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University, where he is the Lucie Stern Professor in the Department of Psychology and directs the Stanford Memory Laboratory.
Wagner’s research focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of memory and cognitive/executive control in young and older adults. His work has focused on memory encoding and retrieval mechanisms; interactions between declarative, nondeclarative, and working memory; forms of cognitive control; neurocognitive aging; and the functional organization of the pre-frontal cortex, parietal cortex, and medial temporal lobe, assessed by functional MRI, scalp, and intercranial EEG and transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Wagner is the author or co-author of over 150 articles published in such journals as Nature, Neuron, and the Journal of Neuroscience and by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. He led the Working Group on Deception and Recognition in the Brain for the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience, headquartered at Vanderbilt University.
At Stanford, Wagner teaches Model and Mechanisms of Memory, Introduction to Learning and Memory, and an advanced seminar on memory.
He holds a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from Stanford University. He joined the faculty of its Department of Psychology in 2003 and served as department chair from 2019 to 2021.
The Weaver Distinguished Lecture is sponsored by the Weaver Family Program in Law, Brain Sciences, and Behavior at Vanderbilt Law School, which is directed by Owen Jones, who holds the Glenn M. Weaver, M.D., and Mary Ellen Weaver Chair in Law, Brain and Behavior. The Weaver Program was established in 2023 with a $3.85 million endowment from the Glenn M. Weaver Foundation in honor of Dr. Weaver, a pioneer in the field of forensic psychiatry, his wife Mary Ellen Weaver, and the Weaver family.
Vanderbilt Law School has trained outstanding lawyers for careers throughout the U.S. and around the world for more than 145 years. The law school is one of 10 schools of Vanderbilt University, which was founded in 1873 in Nashville, Tennessee.