Richard Mooney

Biosketch

Richard Mooney, Ph.D., has served as a George Barth Geller Professor of Research in Neurobiology since 2010. Dr. Mooney earned a B.S. in Biology from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Neurobiology from the California Institute of Technology. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University, he was appointed to the faculty of the Department of Neurobiology in the Duke University School of Medicine in 1994. Dr. Mooney has received the Moore Visiting Fellowship at Caltech, Wiersma Visiting Fellowship at Caltech, Dart Foundation Scholar’s Award, McKnight Investigator Award, Sloane Research Fellowship, Klingenstein Research Fellowship and the Helen Hay Whitney Fellowship. He was also honored to receive the Master Teaching Award, the Davison Teaching Award and the Langford Prize from Duke University. He was elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2024. He was elected vice president of the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience in 2024.

Research Interests

Motivated by a longstanding interest in biology and music, Dr. Mooney's major research interests are understanding how songbirds learn to sing and how mice produce and perceive their innate ultrasonic vocalizations. Recent research from his lab has elucidated the circuit mechanisms that enable juvenile songbirds to form a memory of a tutor’s song, revealed how midbrain dopamine neurons and cortico-basal ganglia circuits are engaged during vocal motor learning, and mapped the structure and function of intracortical circuits that convey motor-related corollary discharge signals to the auditory cortex.