Johan J. Bolhuis is full professor of Cognitive Neurobiology at the Department of Psychology, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. He obtained his PhD in Zoology (cum laude) at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge, UK. He was Asscociate Professor at Leiden University, The Netherlands. He has served as an editor of Animal Behaviour, and as president of the Royal Dutch Zoological Society and is Editor-in-Chief of Behavioural Processes. He was awarded the Zoology Prize of the Royal Dutch Zoological Society in 2001. He is an Affiliated Lecturer at the Department of Psychology, and Honorary Fellow of St. Catharine's College, University of Cambridge.
His main research interests are in the behavioural, neural and cognitive mechanisms of learning, memory and development. His current research is focused on the neural mechanisms of song learning in songbirds, and the parallels with human speech and language, on which he published two cover articles in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (see covers below). In addition, he has a theoretical interest in the relationship between evolution, cognition, and the brain, on which he published essays in Nature and PLoS Biology. He is editor or co-editor of seven books on animal behaviour and cognitive neuroscience, including Brain, Perception, Memory (OUP, 2000), in honour of Sir Gabriel Horn, and Birdsong, Speech, and Language (MIT Press, 2013). Together with Luc-Alain Giraldeau and Jerry Hogan he is editor of the academic textbook The Behavior of Animals (Second Edition, Wiley-Blackwell, 2022).