Francisco Aboitiz

My life as a scientist started from very early, with a keen interest in animals and their behavior. During high school years in Chile, I learned about Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution by natural selection, which blew my mind as a very simple mechanism accounting for the diversity of life. As an undergraduate, I majored in Biology but became increasingly intrigued by the complexity of the brain, particularly the human brain, and asked myself how this enormously intricate structure could result from biological evolution. Particularly, language is one of the key features that makes us widely different from other animals, and I deeply wondered about its origins.

After I graduated in 1983, I traveled to Boston and joined Norman Geschwind’s and Albert Galaburda’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School, which had a reputation for unveiling the neuroanatomical underpinnings of brain asymmetries for language. Beside impregnating myself from knowledge about human and animal cortical neuroanatomy, I learned basic histological techniques that ended up being fundamental for my subsequent research.

In 1985, I started my Neuroscience Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles, where I had the privilege of working with Eran Zaidel and Arne Scheibel as my mentors. Continuing the line of brain asymmetries, my Ph.D. thesis consisted of analyzing the fiber composition of the human corpus callosum, and its variability according to anatomical asymmetries in postmortem human tissue. The results of my thesis provided a reference ground for many other studies that fed on the information contained in this work.

After finishing my Ph.D.an a postdoctorate, in 1992 I came back to Chile, first in the Universidad de Chile (UCh) and later, in 2002, at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC) and started a research program consisting of three main axes:

First, I developed a line of comparative research in the neuroanatomy of interhemispheric connections and brain asymmetries in humans and other mammals. Deepening on this inquiry, I delved into the anatomy of the cerebral cortex of mammals, a character unique to this group, and asked myself about its origins in the first mammals, evolving from the simple brain of the earliest terrestrial vertebrates. I proposed some hypotheses in this line that somehow challenged established views but that subsequent evidence has increasingly supported.

Secondly, I returned to my interest in language origins, studying the neuroanatomy of language networks and their possible homologues in the monkey, a subject few researchers dared to pursue at that point. Together with my students, we depicted a framework for the organization of the language circuits in the humans and their possible origin from ancestral networks in the monkey brain. Again, this proposal has been repeatedly confirmed and reproduced using modern imaging and functional techniques.

A third line of research concerned my affiliation to the Medical Faculties at the UCh and PUC and has consisted of studying cognitive function in diverse neuropsychiatric conditions, including ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, depression and others. In addition, we are developing studies on language processing and social behavior in normal subjects. More recently, we are collaborating with the Epilepsy Program at PUC, by studying cognitive mechanisms using intracranial recordings in patients submitted to neurosurgery.

Finally, together with several colleagues we launched in 2010 the Neuroscience Ph.D. program at PUC, the first of its kind in the country, and more recently the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Center at PUC, aimed at developing translational research and bringing science to the public. This Center fosters different kinds of initiatives of applied sciences, including studying the cognitive effects of robotics workshops in children (RIEN project), and developing tools to aid in the diagnosis and follow-up of different neurological conditions.