Gerhard Werner

Dr. Werner died on March 26, 2012 at the age of 90.

After a career in medicine and brain science that lasted nearly 70 years, Werner's final solo paper "From brain states to mental phenomena via phase space transitions and renormalization group transformation: proposal of a theory" was published in 2012 in the journal Cognitive Neurodynamics. In 2013, Werner and BJ Mitterauer published an article entitled "Neuromodulatory Systems" in the journal Frontiers in Neural Circuits.

In 1984, Werner was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize to study temporal signal correlations in the brain in a collaboration with Heribert Reitboeck at Philipps University of Marburg / Germany.

Vision neuroscientist J. Anthony Movshon of New York University credited Werner and Vernon Mountcastle with introducing Alan Turing's statistical approach to making decisions into neuroscience in the 1960s.

Werner graduated from the University of Vienna Medical School in 1945, and continued studies in mathematics, theoretical physics, and later Psychoanalysis. He joined the World Health Organization (WHO) and served in Calcutta, India and Sao Paulo, Brazil. He worked at Cornell Medical College and Johns Hopkins University with Vernon Mountcastle. He was instrumental in introducing the neuropharmacological use of Succinylcholine. Werner became Chairman of the Pharmacology Department, and later Dean of the Medical School, at the University of Pittsburgh.

Gerhard Werner (1921–2012) was a medical doctor and scholar active in research covering areas of pharmacology, psychiatry, cognitive neuroscience, especially neurodynamics, artificial intelligence, and complexity theory. During his career, and continuing after his retirement in 1989, he published just over a hundred scientific papers and held administrative posts in government, academic and corporate institutions.