Dr. John Hart Jr.
- Professor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences
- Distinguished Chair in Neuroscience
An anonymous gift established the Distinguished Chair in Neuroscience in 2011. Hart is the inaugural holder of the post.
“The University of Texas at Dallas has given me the opportunity to take our work into how normal people store and retrieve knowledge in the brain and apply that to a wide array of medical and societal issues. More importantly, it has offered the opportunity to help train the next generation of cognitive neuroscientists, the accomplishment of which I am the proudest.”
In 1985 Dr. John Hart Jr. established that knowledge is stored in the brain by categories. This finding and others that followed form the basis of a model of human semantic memory called the neural hybrid model and led to the identification of the mechanism of how semantic knowledge is retrieved in the brain.
Hart and his collaborators have now used these fundamental findings to assess patients with a variety of disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder, mild cognitive impairment, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis and Gulf War syndrome. The findings in his studies have led to treatment protocols or diagnostic tools for these diseases.
His current research focuses in part on studying and developing new technologies to provide diagnostic markers of brain disease and to focus on approaches to repair the brain. Hart has been awarded multimillion-dollar Department of Defense grants for novel approaches to treat PTSD, traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis and Gulf War syndrome.
Hart is a past president of the Society for Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology and the Behavioral Neurology Section of the American Academy of Neurology.
He is a graduate of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He received a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Johns Hopkins University, where he did his residency in neurology, a fellowship in cognitive neurology and neuropsychology, and went on to become a faculty member in the Department of Neurology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Following his years at Johns Hopkins, Hart was the director of the Cognition and Brain Imaging Laboratory at the Donald W. Reynolds Center on Aging at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences before joining The University of Texas at Dallas in 2005. Hart also holds joint appointments at UT Southwestern Medical Center as a professor of neurology and of psychiatry.