George Spilich

George Spilich is a behavioral neuroscientist who earned degrees from the University of Wisconsin, the University of Texas at El Paso, and the University of Pittsburgh, where he was at the Learning Research and Development Center. He is currently an emeritus faculty at Washington College, the first college founded after the American Revolution, where he was the department chair for 20 years, was the first John Toll Professor, and won the Lindback Foundation Teaching Award. He was the inaugural curator of the Cromwell Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington College. In academic year 1988–1989, he replaced two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling as the Fulbright Researcher for Yugoslavia and spent the year as visiting professor in the departments of neurology and nuclear medicine at University of Zagreb hospitals. His research interests explore the processes that underlie encoding, storage, and retrieval of information in an effort to understand how a biological system creates and stores expertise and then how disease and damage disrupt that mechanism. He is a member of APA’s Division 6, the Society for Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology.

When he is not thinking or writing about the brain and behavior, he runs, lifts, golfs, plays the guitar, enjoys family time, and travels to national parks for hiking vacations.