Peter L. Strick, PhD

Administrative Accomplishments 

My first academic position was as a Career Research Scientist at the VA Medical Center in Syracuse. I started my own lab while also serving as the physiologist guiding thalamic recordings during stereotaxic surgeries for Parkinson’s disease, severe tremor, and refractory pain. My primary academic appointment was in Neurosurgery at the SUNY Upstate Medical Center. This meant that, from the start, I was learning how to function within both the federal and state systems—an early education in navigating two very different bureaucracies while trying to accomplish some science.

One of the most rewarding parts of that period was working with the neurosurgery residents who rotated through my lab. I introduced them to basic research; they introduced me to the clinical problems they faced. Thanks to two academically oriented department chairs, the environment was one where basic and clinical neuroscience genuinely informed each other. It shaped my understanding of translational research long before the term became fashionable.

My lab was the first in Syracuse to record from single neurons in awake, behaving monkeys, and later the first to use neurotropic viruses—including rabies virus—in primate studies. That work required building trust with animal care and biosafety committees, many of whom understandably reacted strongly to the word “rabies.” What ultimately moved things forward was education, transparency, and a willingness to work together. That experience taught me how to bring people along when the science pushes into unfamiliar and even uncomfortable territory.

My next position was at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), a joint program between Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh. As the Pitt-side Co-Director, I helped strengthen a model that brings together students from computational fields, biological sciences, and psychology—roughly a third from each area. The goal was, and still is, to build a community where students learn to think across disciplines rather than within them. That multidisciplinary spirit is, to me, the essence of neuroscience. It’s why the Society for Neuroscience was created in the first place: to support a field defined not by departmental boundaries or favored techniques, but by the drive to ask fundamental questions about the nervous system and to use whatever tools are needed to answer them. My career has been shaped by that belief, and it continues to influence the way I think about our community and its future.

Since 2012, I have served as Chair of the Department of Neurobiology and as Co-Director of the Center for Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh. In many ways, these roles have brought me face-to-face with the practical challenges each of us is experiencing. How do we sustain and expand funding in an increasingly uncertain environment. How do we attract and support the next generation of neuroscientists—students who are talented, diverse, and eager to push boundaries. And how do we rebuild and strengthen the public’s trust in science at a time when misinformation spreads more easily than evidence. These questions are not abstract to me; they are the issues we all grapple with every day. And they are exactly the kinds of challenges that the Society for Neuroscience must help us confront—not as isolated investigators or institutions, but as a substantial scientific community.

Current Position(s) at Your Current Institution

• Distinguished Professor and Chair, Department of Neurobiology
• Thomas Detre Endowed Chair in Neuroscience
• Co-Director, Center for Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh
• Director, Systems Neuroscience Center

Degree, Institute, Year Earned

Research Areas

My research has focused on three major areas: 1) the generation and control of voluntary movement by the motor areas of the cerebral cortex; 2) the motor, cognitive and affective functions of the basal ganglia and cerebellum; and 3) the neural basis for the mind-body connection.

Memberships & Service

Service Positions

Editorial Boards:

Other Service Positions:

Science Biography

Historically, the primary motor cortex was considered the principal source of descending commands for voluntary movement. Using conventional anatomical tracing, we demonstrated that the frontal lobe contains at least six premotor areas that also send direct projections to the spinal cord. Each premotor area contributes in a distinct way to motor control. These findings established that the cortical control of movement relies on multiple, parallel descending pathways rather than a single dominant output system.

Our laboratory also showed that the primary motor cortex itself is not a homogeneous structure but contains two subdivisions: a caudal “new M1” and a more rostral “old M1.” New M1 contains corticospinal neurons that make direct, monosynaptic connections onto spinal motoneurons and provides the substrate for the fine, fractionated control of distal musculature characteristic of primate motor behavior. It is considered “new” because it is present only in some monkeys, great apes, and humans. Moreover, the cortico-motoneuronal connection is not present at birth but develops postnatally. In contrast, old M1 influences motor output primarily through spinal interneurons, reflecting a more evolutionarily conserved mode of motor control. This internal differentiation within M1 reinforces the broader shift toward viewing the cortical motor system as a set of distributed, interacting modules rather than a single hierarchical command center.

In a 1986 review, Gary Alexander, Mahlon DeLong, and I proposed that the basal ganglia form at least five major, functionally segregated circuits with motor, associative, and limbic regions of the cerebral cortex. This framework implied that the basal ganglia influence not only movement, but also cognition and affect. The model helped drive a major shift in how the field conceptualizes basal ganglia function and its role in neurologic and neuropsychiatric disease.

To test this circuit-based model, we developed the use of neurotropic viruses to map multisynaptic pathways in the primate brain. Transneuronal viral tracing provided strong evidence for multiple parallel motor and non-motor circuits within the basal ganglia. It also revealed that cerebellar output targets not only motor areas but also non-motor regions of the frontal lobe.

Overall, viral tracing showed that outputs from both the cerebellum and basal ganglia reach a broad set of cortical territories, including primary motor, premotor, oculomotor, prefrontal, and posterior parietal areas. These pathways provide the anatomical substrate for cerebellar and basal ganglia involvement in cognitive operations such as working memory, rule learning, attentional shifting, and planning. A corollary is that dysfunction within these circuits can contribute to a wide spectrum of neurologic and psychiatric disorders. Further work revealed subcortical connections between the basal ganglia and cerebellum, suggesting that these structures, together with the cerebral cortex, form an integrated network spanning multiple functional domains.

More recently, we applied viral tracing to revisit a classical question in neuroscience: the neural basis of brain–body interactions. We found that cortical regions involved in motor control, cognition, and affect send descending signals to the adrenal medulla, a key effector in the stress response. These findings provide a concrete anatomical framework for understanding how our actions, thoughts, and emotions can influence adrenal function and shape physiological responses to stress.

The full CV for this candidate can be found within the ballot.