About the College
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About the Dean
Dean George R. Mangun
GEORGE R. MANGUN is Dean of the Division of Social Sciences, and Professor of Psychology and Neurology. Mangun, an international leader in cognitive neuroscience, received his Ph.D. in 1987 from the University of California, San Diego. He began his professorial career in 1990 at Dartmouth College and Medical School in the Program in Cognitive Neuroscience, where he also served as director of the graduate program. In 1992, he joined the Psychology Department at UC Davis as one of the founding faculty members of the Center for Neuroscience. He taught sensation, perception and cognitive neuroscience, developing new courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and serving as head of the Perception and Cognition Area of the Psychology Department.
In 1999, he was tapped by Duke University to found and direct the interdisciplinary Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. At Duke, he established one of the nation’s most prominent programs for the study of the human brain and mind, recruiting award-winning scholars and developing a strong new graduate training program in cognitive neuroscience. Mangun was recruited back to UC Davis in 2002 to found the Center for Mind and Brain, a major new campus initiative, which he directed until 2009. The center now comprises seventeen faculty laboratories that are supported by more than $16 million in federal and private grants addressing a range of scientific questions at the cutting edge of mind and brain research in health and disease (see http://mindbrain.ucdavis.edu/).
Mangun is past Editor of Cognitive Brain Research, and is currently a Senior Editor for Brain Research, and an Associate Editor for the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief for the new series Neuroscience of Attention (Oxford University Press). Mangun has consulted and served on numerous editorial boards and advisory and review committees nationally and internationally, including for the National Institutes of Health, The National Science Foundation, the Academy of Finland, The Wellcome Trust (U.K.), the Dutch Science Foundation (Netherlands), and the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academies.
Mangun is one of the leaders of the cognitive neuroscience revolution that has so captivated the minds of a generation of neuroscientists and psychologists. In 1992 at UC Davis, he chaired the founding committee of the international Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and has been its treasurer and an ex officio member of the society's Governing Board since that time. The society has more than 3000 members worldwide, and hosts an annual meeting that attracts close to 2000 scientists from around the globe to present their research. He is a popular speaker at national and international venues; recent lectures include plenary and keynote lectures at the annual meetings of the Society for Psychophysiological Research, and the Japanese Psychological Association.
Mangun has published more than 110 scientific papers, chapters, books, edited volumes and special journal issues, including his celebrated co-authored undergraduate textbook dedicated to the cognitive neurosciences, Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind, published by W.W. Norton (3rd Edition, 2008). His textbook, the first written on the emerging field of cognitive neuroscience, has been translated into Portuguese, French, and Italian, and the 3rd Edition will be translated into Chinese.
His own research, which has been supported by more than $10 million in extramural grant funding over the past two decades, incorporates electrophysiological and functional neuroimaging methods in the study of the mechanisms of human attention and awareness. His laboratory in the Center for Mind and Brain continues research on attention mechanisms in healthy and patient populations and is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation. His students and trainees are also supported by prestigious fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Dutch Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and training grants from the National Institutes of Health.
For his scientific contributions, among other honors, he received the Distinguished Early Career Contributions Award from the Society for Psychophysiological Research in 1993, a Distinguished Scientist Lecturer Award from the American Psychological Association in 1999, and a Senior Scientist Award from the National Institute of Mental Health in 2001. In 2006, Mangun was elected one of 34 North American members of the International Neuropsychological Symposium, and in the same year he received a James McKeen Cattell Fellowship from the Association for Psychological Science. In 2007, he was elected a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and in 2009 was honored as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Sage Center for the Mind at UC Santa Barbara.
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