Peggy Mason Author

Dr Peggy Mason's love of science gained an early start as a child taxidermist in Washington, DC. She received her BA in Biology (1983) and PhD in Neuroscience from Harvard University in 1987 and completed her post-doctoral training in Neurology at UCSF in 1991. She is currently a Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Chicago. She is committed to teaching neurobiology to anyone that will listen and has won multiple awards for her teaching of medical students at the Pritzker School of Medicine. She is the inaugural director of the Neuroscience program at the University of Chicago College. Her massively open online course (MOOC) on Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life has reached more than 100,000 students. In groundbreaking work that has garnered worldwide attention and excitement, Dr. Mason demonstrated that rats help other rats in distress. Her laboratory continues to investigate the biology of empathy and pro-social behavior.