Ralph Adolphs is the Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He did his Ph.D. with Mark Konishi, on the auditory system of owls, at Caltech in 1992, followed by a post-doc with Antonio Damasio at the University of Iowa. There he began his career in human neuroscience of social cognition and emotion, with an initial focus on the amygdala. Since returning to Caltech in 2004, his lab has continued to build on the investigation of human social behavior, encompassing recordings in epilepsy patients, neuroimaging, and behavioral measures. His new book forthcoming in 2026 (Princeton University Press) is “The New Science of Emotion: how brains represent what matters in the world.”