Peggy Mason grew up in the Washington DC area and worked in taxidermy at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History during middle and high school. She received her BA in Biology in 1983 and her PhD in Neuroscience in 1987, both from Harvard. After postdoctoral work at the University of California - San Francisco, she joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1992. Dr Mason is now Professor of Neurobiology. For more than 20 years, Dr Mason's research was focused on the cellular mechanisms of pain modulation. In the last ten plus years, Dr Mason has turned her energies to the biology of empathy and helping behavior in rats.
Dr Mason taught medical students for 25 years and wrote a textbook for medical students, now in its second edition (Medical Neurobiology, Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 2017). Dr Mason started the Neuroscience major at UChicago and was awarded the Quantrell Award, the nation’s oldest prize for undergraduate teaching, in 2018. More broadly, Dr Mason is a neuroevangelist, interested in teaching neurobiology to anyone that will listen. To that end, Dr Mason publishes a blog at https://thebrainissocool.com/ and has offered a massively open online course, Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life through Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/course/neurobio) since 2014 with a cumulative enrollment of more than 270,000.
Last weekend, I was taking a walk with my spouse, Gisèle. As we passed our neighbor’s house, a large, attractively tawny dog ran towards us barking. But the dog did not come all the way to us, stopping several yards from the street. Gisèle told me the dog had been trained with a so-called invisible fence in which moving past a line triggers […]
Last week, I woke up and read a New York Times article by James Glanz and Agustin Armendariz on a famous and celebrated cancer scientist, Carlo Croce of Ohio State, who has been repeatedly implicated in scientific fraud. This moved me to shelve my plans for a post on Neuro-Generosity and proceed immediately to GO with a post on scientific misconduct. I aim to make fourpoints in […]
My mom was supposed to come visit me this past week while I have been teaching in Paris. She was scheduled to arrive Wednesday morning and in a reprisal of our fabulous time together in 2015 (see picture above), we planned to pack our afternoons with art museums and our evenings with concerts. Then, a few days before she was due […]
Over the holidays, I took two of my students out for lunch. We actually left campus and ended up at a small, packed-to-the-gills-deli where we sat at long tables with the other refugees from the lunch joints with larger seating capacities and individual tables that were closed for the holidays. Hyde Park is within the city of Chicago but has […]
A miracle has occurred. Actually there was no miracle at all, just a ton of hard work by a number of talented professionals and me. The second edition of my textbook, Medical Neurobiology (Oxford University Press, 2017) is in production. My part is done. Of course my part started with a few years of writing which was greatly aided by my […]
Just a few days ago, I wrote a post about a very unusual occurrence: a serious change in a fundamental piece of neuroanatomy. To recapitulate, Jean Francois Brunet and his colleagues, including lead author Isabel Espinosa–Medina, used a modern molecular approach to show that the autonomic motor neurons in the sacral cord share their characteristics with the sympathetic motor neurons in […]
There has been a revolution in the unlikeliest of disciplines! Neuroanatomy! Yes neuroanatomy – so cut and dry – has been seriously altered by new research. The textbook world of neuroanatomy turned upside down yesterday. A team led by Jean François Brunet of INSERM in Paris has made the audacious proposal that the autonomic outflow of the sacral cord is […]
I just finished teaching Pritzker Medical students (Class of 2015). Once again, it was fun; I learned things and had new thoughts. Teaching is indeed learning. Today I want to share a recent teaching joy. Pritzker students gathered together on their own initiative to explore caloric testing, which I had talked about in class but never included in laboratory […]
This morning, Diana Keat, a NeuroMOOC student and friend texted me about a story on NPR’s The Takeaway that was about air conditioning as a necessity. As some of you may know from a previous post, the neurobiology of heat waves is one of my pet topics. Mammals have no way to actively cool themselves aka to “refrigerate” their bodies. We can heat ourselves very […]
Three years ago, an incoming University of Chicago student named Haozhe Shan emailed me asking for an opportunity to work in my laboratory. His letter was well written and demonstrated a focussed and specific interest in social neuroscience. I agreed to talk with him and immediately liked him. Even prior to taking a single college class, he had a knowledge of psychology […]
Join me and thousands of others in the next offering of Understanding the brain. The start date will be announced here when available.
To learn much much more about the brain in all of its splendorous detail, check out my textbook. The second edition is now out!! Get it here: textbook. 
The brain is sooooo cool! 