David Amaral
professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Davis
David Gil Amaral is a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Davis, United States, and since 1998 has been the research director at the M.I.N.D. Institute, an affiliate of UC Davis, engaged in interdisciplinary research into the causes and treatment of autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders. Amaral joined the UC Davis faculty as a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and the Center for Neuroscience and as an investigator at the California Regional Primate Research Center in 1991. Since 1995, he has been a professor of psychiatry in the UC Davis School of Medicine, with an appointment to the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience.
Education
In 1972, Amaral earned his bachelor's degree in psychology from Northwestern University, and in 1977 his PhD in neurobiology and psychology at the University of Rochester. From 1977 to 1980, Amaral was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow with Dr. W. Maxwell Cowan at the Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology, Washington University School of Medicine.
Research
Amaral studies the organization and functioning of the hippocampus, the amygdala and other parts of the primate and human brain. Amaral has directed several million dollars' worth of research with grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which has included primate research investigations on the function of the amygdala, a brain region associated with emotion processing. Amaral investigated "Postmortem Neuroanatomical Evaluation of the Amygdaloid Complex in Autism". His earlier studies detected alterations in the amygdala, which some have speculated underlies the social and emotional abnormalities in autism.
“David Amaral” enters the record as professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Davis. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what David, Amaral and professor can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5230748. VIAF identifies the subject as 261449601. The Library of Congress control number is n2006185295. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1998, 1991, 1995 and 1972.
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