Dr. Olney received Academy’s 1996 Peter H. Raven Lifetime Award for neuroscience research on brain-damaging properties of glutamate and its role in neuro degenerative diseases with significant implications for treatment of acute brain disorders such as stroke, trauma and epilepsy.

Dr. Olney directs a research program that has been supported continuously for the past three decades by a Career Research Scientist Award from the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Olney is internationally recognized for his pioneering research pertaining to the actions of glutamate in the central nervous system. His early studies helped establish glutamate as a major excitatory transmitter that is vitally important for normal brain function, but his discoveries revealed that glutamate is also a neurotoxin that can destroy nerve cells by excessive stimulation of their excitatory receptors.

In the early 1970s, he coined the term "excitotoxicity" to refer to the cell killing action of glutamate and he hypothesized that glutamate excitotoxicity might play an important role in neurodegenerative diseases. These early insights set the stage for the subsequent discovery that acute brain injury associated with common conditions such as stroke, head trauma and epilepsy is triggered by excessive activation of glutamate receptors.

Dr. Olney's recent studies are helping to define a role for glutamate in chronic neuropsychiatric disorders, including Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia. His research also focuses on developmental disorders of the central nervous system. In the late 1960s, Dr. Olney fed glutamate to animals and found that it destroyed nerve cells in the brain. Because infant animals were especially sensitive to this neurotoxic action, he undertook a long battle that eventually resulted in the food industry ending its practice of adding glutamate to baby foods. Much more recently, he and his colleagues have discovered that the toxic effects of alcohol on the human fetal brain (fetal alcohol syndrome) are mediated by a disruptive effect of alcohol on the glutamate transmitter system, a disruptive effect that causes developing nerve cells to commit suicide.

Dr. Olney has published hundreds of articles in leading medical journals, and has won numerous awards, including the Wakeman Award, Dana Foundation Award and Society for Biological Psychiatry Lifetime Achievements Award. Dr. Olney is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.