Kenneth Hugdahl - Biography#

Kenneth Hugdahl (1948) took a PhD in psychology at Uppsala University, Sweden, 1977. After a period as postdoc at the Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1979, where he studied mechanisms of phobic anxiety under mentorship of Martin Seligman, he was appointed full professor of biological psychology at the University of Bergen in 1984.

Hugdahl has been visiting professor at the Neuropsychiatric Institute, UCLA, USA in 1990 and at the Max-Planck Institute for Behavioral neurology, Leipzig, Germany in 2001, during which he studied brain asymmetry and language processes using methods and techniques he had invented and developed earlier.

In 1993 Hugdahl took initiative, together with Lars Ersland, and founded the Bergen fMRI Group, to start research with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) which had been introduced internationally a few years before. The Bergen fMRI Group became quite influential over the years and is today an internationally well recognized group.. Hugdahl was one of the founding partners of the NordicNeuroLab Inc (NNL) company in 2001, http://www.nordicneurolab.com, which produces add-on hard- and software for fMRI investigations. The company is today world leading for these products, holds three US and Europe patents.

Kenneth Hugdahl has made significant contributions to several areas of research including brain asymmetry and language, attention and executive functions, auditory processing, neuroimaging, and auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia. In 2015 he and colleagues discovered a novel large-scale brain cortical network, the extrinsic mode network, which is upregulated whenever the brain goes into a processing mode.

Hugdahl is author of >500 publications according to Web of Science, and has >37.500 citations, h-index 109, in Google Scholar Citations. He is ranked as #1 citations in Neuroscience and #2 in Psychology in Norway according to Research.com database (https://research.com/u/kenneth-hugdahl), and has a long career as research leader and student supervisor.

He has been chief editor of the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, and associate editor of several journals, and has edited five books (MIT Press, Kluwer Press, Wiley) on brain asymmetry and neuropsychology.