Program Directors

The Directors for the University of Washington’s Graduate Program in Neuroscience serve 5-year terms and are required to be from two separate home Departments. The Current Directors are Horacio de la Iglesia from the Biology Department and Paul Phillips from Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Department.

Potential Directors are identified through a nomination process hosted by the Neuroscience Steering Committee at least a year before directors are set to change over. The Steering Committee solicits nominations and discusses all available options. Once they have their candidates, names are sent to the Dean of the Graduate School. Reappointment of the current Directors is possible, but is subject to a vote by the Steering Committee and reappointment by the Dean of the Graduate School. Leadership transition requires close coordination with the Graduate School’s Office of Academic Affairs & Planning and the Director of Interdisciplinary Programs. The Steering Committee is responsible for ongoing leadership succession planning.

Current Directors:

Paul Phillips (Left) and Horacio de la Iglesia (Right)

Horacio de la Iglesia finished his undergraduate studies in Biology at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. He got his PhD in Neuroscience and Behavior at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where working with Eric Bittman he studied the neuroanatomical interactions between the master circadian clock of mammals and the brain centers that control reproduction . He then continued his research on the neural control of circadian rhythms as a Post-doctoral Fellow and as an Instructor in the laboratory of William Schwartz at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He was also an Instructor at Harvard University where he taught a course on Stem Cells. Dr. de la Iglesia joined the University of Washington Department of Biology in 2003 and has been Director of the Neuroscience Program since 2017

Paul Phillips graduated in Physiology from the University of Liverpool in 1993. He then joined the Neurotransmission Research Group in the Academic Department of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care at St Bartholomew’s and the Royal London School of Medicine and Dentistry (University of London) where he completed his PhD in Neuroscience under the supervision of Jon Stamford. In 1999 he moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to take up a postdoctoral position with Mark Wightman in the Department of Chemistry. In 2003 he was appointed to Research Assistant Professor in Psychology at UNC and then joined the faculty in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington in 2004. Paul has been Director of the Neuroscience Program since 2017.

Directors History: