Obituary Edward G. Jones, D.Phil., M.D.

Obituary

Edward G. Jones, D.Phil., M.D.

Edward (Ted) G. Jones died unexpectedly

on June 6

2011 while attending a meeting

at U.C.L.A. Medical Center. He was 72

years of age.

Born near Wellington New Zealand in 1939

and raised under very modest

circumstances Ted defied the odds by

attending Medical School at the University of

Otago where he graduated in 1962. He then

worked for a year as a house officer in a

community hospital and begun working

towards an academic medical career at the

University of Otago where he was

increasingly drawn to basic science. He

then obtained a prestigious fellowship to

train in Neuroanatomy at the University of

Oxford with the eminent neuroanatomist

Tom Powell, arriving there in 1965 with his

wife Sue and obtaining his Ph.D. in 1968.

His three-year doctoral training period

produced 23 papers many of which were of

seminal importance. After serving as a

lecturer at Oxford and back in New Zealand

where he was Associate Professor in the

Anatomy Department at Otago Ted moved

to the United States where he joined the

Faculty at Washington University in St. Louis

and through a period of prodigious

productivity rapidly established himself as

one of the leading figures in Neuroanatomy

and the emerging new interdisciplinary field

of Neuroscience. In 1984 he moved to U.C.

Irvine where he took over as Chair of the

Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology.

During his time at Irvine Ted also ran a

laboratory in Japan at the Riken Institute. In

1998 Ted moved to the University of

California at Davis where he became

Director of the Center for Neuroscience, a

position that he held till his retirement in

2010, During this time he presided over an

extraordinary period of growth and

development of the Center, transforming it

from one with a primary cognitive and

systems focus to one that spanned the full

range of approaches from molecular, cellular

and systems to behavioral and cognitive

neuroscience.

Ted Jones distinguished himself in many

areas of neuroscience. He was

unquestionably the world authority on the

Thalamus, producing a remarkable two-

volume book filled with his own

photomicrographs and illustrations. He was

a pioneer of the study of cortico-cortical

circuitry and the subpopulations of neurons

that comprise local cortical circuits and of

neuroplasticity in the cortex and thalamus

that helped define the field. It has been said

that during his career he studied every area

of the brain with every important new

technique available to him, with

extraordinary rigor and a conceptual clarity

and sense of perspective that few in the field

have attained. He was a leader of the

Human Brain Project, an NIH funded

neuroinformatics initiative that has led to the

development of accessible databases and

atlases of human and animal brain anatomy.

He was also a pioneer of modern human

post mortem analyses of psychiatric

diseases, conducting the first modern

immunohistochemical studies of post

mortem tissue in schizophrenia and

introducing the use of array technologies to

study gene expression in the post mortem

brains of individuals with schizophrenia and

mood disorders. The modern view of

schizophrenia as a disorder of cortical

microcircuitry evolved out of this work, which

was conducted through his role in the

Pritzker Consortium. He was also an

important historian of neuroscience, having

trained in the traditions of the classic

neuroanatomists and lived through the

emergence of the field in the 1960’s and its

subsequent explosion of knowledge during

the next 40 years.

Ted Jones was a scientist’s scientist, a

discerning, traditional scholar who could

always be found at his microscope, and who

inspired and led his fellow neuroscientists

and recruits by example. He had a very

broad, integrative and inclusive view of

neuroscience that is reflected in the Center