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 Friday, I had a delightful visit from Diana Keat, a MOOC student and Facebook friend, and her husband Eddie. It was great fun to meet Diana and Eddie. I am hoping to see them again soon if I can manage to get to their home town of Philadelphia to see the Greg Dunn exhibit at the Franklin Institute. One of […]
As you may know, I am working steadily on the second edition of my book, Medical Neurobiology (OUP, 2011) and have had no time for play. This blog is play for me, a total relaxing tonic for me. Yesterday, I received a bunch of brain pictures from a colleague. I really like this one but I cannot use it in my book […]
Once upon a time there was dead and there was alive. The twain did not meet nor intersect outside of religious miracles. The era of dead-or-alive lasted for millennia until the 20th century when technological advances inserted an in-between state that consisted of alive only because of medical assistance. The first crack in the dead-or-alive edifice started with ventilators, machines that […]
The New York Times’ Amy Harmon’s article this morning made public the dismissal….er resignation of Jason Lieb from the University of Chicago. This is big news. A full Professor at an elite university is gone because of sexual misconduct. How often does this happen? Not clear (because it is typically hushed up as much as possible) but not tremendously often. How often is such a happening made public? Almost never. UChicago has been my home for nearly a quarter of a century and I love her. I am also a woman and a person. So I have feelings which I will share here. The buck stops with the University of Chicago There is good and bad in this story. First the good. The good is that after Princeton and University of North Carolina appear to have kicked the can down the road, the University of Chicago put an end to the charade that Jason Lieb is an innocent victim of baseless accusations. The University of Chicago received a complaint, took immediate and appropriate action including affording Mr Lieb due process and came out with a conclusion. Mr Lieb violated the University’s sexual misconduct policy. This is now a matter of public record and any university that chooses to employ Mr Lieb, I am hoping this is unlikely, cannot plead ignorance. There were rumors that Mr Lieb had left one or both of his previous institutions due to sexual misconduct. Yet, that is all that […]
I have tried, repeatedly, to get my mother to stop driving. She just celebrated her 88th birthday. Every time I raise this issue, she emphatically insists that she is not giving up driving. I reason that the cost of taxis would easily be less than what she spends on gas, car maintenance, and insurance. She tells me that she absolutely needs […]
As many of you know, I love to hear your stories of your encounters with your brains. Through a circuitous route (no other type appears to exist in my world) that involves a marvelous final MOOC project by Luiz Meier (more on that another time), I was privileged to receive the following description of a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) from Paul Van […]
I’ll be talking about the movie Concussion on WTTW, channel 11 here in Chicagoland. I look forward to talking with Phil Ponce on my second stint on Chicago Tonight (on my first visit, I talked about our work with rats and helping behavior). To anticipate talking about concussions (more so than about the movie), I thought I’d get into the spirit and give […]
Recently I was asked to answer a “Proust Questionnaire” for a get-to-know-your-teacher blurb. I had never heard the term but the exemplary questions, (e.g. Your favorite virtue; If not yourself, who would you be?; For what fault have you most toleration?; Favorite heroines in fiction) were clear enough that I was able to get into the spirit. I wrote back my […]
Whenever I teach eye movements, I am reminded of how exciting they are. I like that eye movements appear mundane, common, and perhaps even uninteresting. They fly under most people’s wow-o-cool-o-radar, giving all the appearance of a nuts-and-bolts system without lofty aspirations. Despite this unpretentious appearance, eye movements are incredibly interesting and also of the utmost importance to our social selves. There is so much more to […]
This week, neurobiology bumped up into current events and it all played out in the context of teaching. I taught a module on Neural Communication to my second year Pritzker Medical School students. One of the topics that I covered is how neurons understand the message that is sent their way, a lecture that centers on post-synaptic receptors and the drugs […]
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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! 