January/February 2001

Olds Joins Ranks of University Professors By Emily Yaghmour Jim Olds, director and chief executive officer of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, has been appointed university professor, making him one of only 10 George Mason faculty members to hold this title. According to the Faculty Handbook, the rank of university professor is reserved for “men and women of unusually great stature and eminence from the world of national and international achievement.” Olds’s appointment is “a testimony to the innovative quality of his research in neuroscience and the tremendous research leadership he has provided to Krasnow and the university,” says Provost Peter Stearns. In his research, Olds focuses on the way the brain stores and retrieves memory. He developed an imaging method that allows scientists to see what happens in the brain when a memory is stored and retrieved. His research led him to the surprising finding that, at least in mammals, memories are stored “in a much more dispersed fashion than many of us had intuitively thought.” The storage of memory is “not limited to isolated colonies of nerve cells,” he says. Olds has taught classes at George Mason since 1996 as an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychology and became director of Krasnow in July 1998. “I think the university and the institute are two independent institutions that clearly help each other and need each other,” says Olds. “I think the university-institute relationship will only become closer over time.”