Born in 1939 in New York, USA, John O’Keefe is an American-British neuroscientist and psychologist. He received a PhD in physiological psychology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada in 1967, and then moved to the United Kingdom to do research at University College London.
He stayed in London and in 1987 was appointed professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College. He discovered place cells in the hippocampus, and that they show a specific kind of temporal coding in the form of theta phase precession.
He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014, together with May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser; he has received several other awards. He has worked at University College London for his entire career, but also held a part-time chair at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology at the behest of his Norwegian collaborators, the Mosers.
