James Olds

Following his Ph.D., Olds went on to do postdoctoral work at McGill University under Donald Olding Hebb, where he made his most important discovery with Peter Milner. Subsequently, Olds moved to UCLA, where he took his first academic appointment at the Brain Research Institute. In 1957 Olds was appointed associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan. He left Michigan in 1969 to become the Bing Professor of Behavioral Biology at the California Institute of Technology where he continued his research and led a large lab until his death in a swimming accident in August 1976. His last work was aimed at understanding the mechanisms of learning and memory.

Olds attended college at a number of schools including St. John’s College, Annapolis, and the University of Wisconsin but received his undergraduate B.A. from Amherst College in 1947. His undergraduate years were interrupted by military service in the U.S. Army during the Second World War as part of the Persian Gulf Command. Following the war, Olds went on to get his Ph.D. at Harvard University in the Department of Social Relations under Professor Richard L. Solomon. His thesis was focused on motivation and led to his subsequent interest in the biological basis of motivation.

James Olds (May 30, 1922 – August 21, 1976) was an American psychologist who co-discovered the pleasure center of the brain with Peter Milner while he was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University in 1954. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern neuroscience and received numerous distinctions ranging from election to the United States National Academy of Sciences to the Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.