Rate My Professor Read Montague

Read Montague is the Virginia Tech Carilion Vernon Mountcastle Research Professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC and Director of the Center for Human Neuroscience Research. He also serves as Professor in the Department of Physics in the College of Science and Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine. Montague previously held the Brown Foundation Professorship of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directed the Human Neuroimaging Lab and the Computational Psychiatry Unit. He earned a Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Salk Institute and Rockefeller University.

Montague’s research centers on computational neuroscience, including the role of dopaminergic systems in encoding reward prediction error signals and the translation of these insights into computational psychiatry. His laboratory has pioneered methods for measuring sub-second fluctuations in dopamine and serotonin levels in the living human brain. Professional appointments include service on the MacArthur Foundation Network on Neuroscience and Law. He has received the Michael E. DeBakey Excellence in Research Award (1997 and 2005), a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellowship (2011–2018), and other honors such as Kavli Fellow and membership in the Institute for Advanced Study. Montague maintains an Honorary Professorship at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London.