Brian Knutson is an associate at the University’s Center for Health Policy and Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research. His research focuses on the neural basis of emotional experience and expression. He investigates this topic with a number of methods, including self-report, measurement of nonverbal behavior, comparative ethology, psychopharmacology and functional brain imaging. His long-term goal is to understand the neurochemical and neuroanatomical mechanisms responsible for emotional experience and to explore the implications of these findings for economic behavior, as well as for the assessment and treatment of clinical disorders of affect and addiction.

Knutson has received Young Investigator Awards from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, the Association for Behavioral Medicine Research, the American Psychiatric Association and the New York Academy of Science. He received bachelor’s degrees in experimental psychology and comparative religion from Trinity University, as well as a doctorate in experimental psychology from Stanford. He has conducted postdoctoral research in affective neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco and at the National Institutes of Health.