The H.W. Magoun Lecture was instituted in 1989 as an annual lecture both to honor the BRI's founder, Dr. Horace (Tid) Magoun, and to recognize outstanding achievements by BRI members. The lecturer is selected by a faculty committee, which evaluates nominations from the membership at large.

Michael S. Fanselow, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at UCLA, presented the twentieth Annual H.W. Magoun Lecture. Dr. Fanselow’s lecture was titled “The Dynamic Origin of Memory Systems in the Brain: Insight from Contextual Fear Conditioning,” and was presented to the neuroscience community on March 10, 2009. Dr. Fanselow was selected by the committee and honored for his research that has fundamentally shaped the field of learning and memory—most notably his seminal demonstration that hippocampal lesions produce temporally graded loss of memory, and his description and studies of contextual fear conditioning. Dr. Fanselow has done a great deal of elegant and pivotal work in the study of the basic properties of learning and memory. He is single handedly responsible for the development and present popularity of one of the most influential rodent behavioral paradigms: contextual fear conditioning. Besides establishing the basic properties of contextual conditioning, he has used it to study many interesting and influential cognitive phenomena, including emotional memory. Dr. Fanselow is also an exceptional mentor; his students and post-docs have been successful at finding academic jobs in leading institutions around the world, and some are recognized as emerging leaders in the field of learning and memory. Dr. Fanselow’s scholarly achievements have been recognized with major awards, among which are election to membership in the American Asssociation for the Advancement of Science and the Society of Experimental Psychologists, receipt of the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the D. O. Hebb Award from the American Psychological Association, and the W. H. Gantt Medal from the Pavlovian Society. In addition to his scholarly achievements, Dr. Fanselow has taken a leadership role at both the university and national level. He is one of the co-directors of UCLA’s Learning and Memory Project, and he has also been President of the Division of Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Physiology of the American Psychological Association (1998) and the Pavlovian Society (2001).

Previous H.W. Magoun Distinguished Lecturers include:
First Annual H.W. Magoun Distinguished Lecturer: William H. Oldendorf, M.D.
Second Annual H.W. Magoun Distinguished Lecturer: Arnold B. Scheibel, M.D.
Third Annual H.W. Magoun Distinguished Lecturer: Joaquin Fuster, M.D.
Fourth Annual H.W. Magoun Distinguished Lecturer: Francisco Bezanilla, Ph.D.
Fifth Annual H.W. Magoun Distinguished Lecturer: John C. Liebeskind, Ph.D.
Sixth Annual H.W. Magoun Distinguished Lecturer: Elizabeth F. Neufeld, Ph.D.
Seventh Annual H.W. Magoun Distinguished Lecturer: Enrico Stefani, M.D., Ph.D.
Eighth Annual H.W. Magoun Distinguished Lecturer: Lutz Birnbaumer, Ph.D.
Ninth Annual H.W. Magoun Distinguished Lecturer: Lawrence Kruger, Ph.D.
Tenth Annual H.W. Magoun Distinguished Lecturer: William M. Pardridge, M.D. Eleventh Annual H.W. Magoun Distinguished Lecturer: S. Lawrence Zipursky, Ph.D.
Twelfth Annual H.W. Magoun Distinguished Lecturer: Debora Farber, Ph.D.
Thirteenth Annual H.W. Magoun Distinguished Lecturer: Anthony Campagnoni, Ph.D. Fourteenth Annual H.W. Magoun Distinguished Lecturer: Arthur P. Arnold, Ph.D. Fifteenth Annual H.W. Magoun Distinguished Lecturer: Allan J. Tobin, Ph.D. Sixteenth Annual H.W. Magoun Distinguished Lecturer: Jack L. Feldman, Ph.D. Seventeenth Annual H.W. Magoun Distinguished Lecturer: Jerome M. Siegel, Ph.D. Eighteenth Annual H.W. Magoun Distinguished Lecturer: Richard W. Olsen, Ph.D.
Nineteenth Annual H.W. Magoun Distinguished Lecturer: Diane M. Papazian, Ph.D.