Tor Wager, the Diana L. Taylor 1977 Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience, has been named a recipient of the Atkinson Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences by the National Academy of Sciences.
The prestigious biennial prize, which includes a $100,000 award, honors significant advances in the psychological and cognitive sciences with important implications for formal and systematic theory in these fields. Wager will receive the prize at the academy’s annual meeting on April 26.
Wager’s research focuses on the neurophysiology of affective processes—pain, emotion, stress, and empathy—and how they are shaped by cognitive and social influences. Through innovative neuroimaging approaches, he has illuminated the brain mechanisms underlying placebo effects, pain perception, and emotion regulation, bridging cognitive and affective neuroscience with clinical applications.
“He has also developed and implemented innovative methods for human brain imaging, advancing the field’s ability to identify replicable and generalizable patterns of brain activity,” the award citation states. “A mentor, leader, and a visionary, Wager has provided deep mechanistic insight, methodological innovation, and key leadership to shape the field.”
“Tor Wager has deepened our understanding of the human condition using a truly creative mix of technical scientific methods, experimental design, and clever analysis,” says Jane Lipson, associate dean for the sciences. “His work will not only lead to new strategies for the treatment of pain and other life-altering maladies, his scientific leadership will empower future generations of scientists.”
In addition to directing the Dartmouth Brain Imaging Center, Wager serves as a faculty affiliate of the Breaking the Neural Code Cluster, which advances understanding of how the mind is encoded in patterns of activity among billions of cells, leading to the neurological equivalent of decoding the human genome.
Wager’s path to neuroscience was unconventional. As a music composition major in college, he loved writing music but eventually realized his true calling lay elsewhere. After graduation, while traveling through Nepal and India, he returned to an earlier interest: understanding how the brain creates the mind.
“What is the power of belief and thought, and how does it matter for our health and body?” he says. “That's been a guiding question throughout my career.”
Before applying to graduate school, he worked in labs at the University of Colorado, where he was introduced to placebo effects while studying learning and memory. This work would become the foundation for his PhD research at the University of Michigan. (Among his many mentors, Wager credits scholars Randy O’Reilly, Akira Miyake, and Alice Healy at Colorado, and Edward Smith and John Jonides at Michigan.)
In 2004, Wager published the first-ever fMRI study of placebo effects in Science. He and his colleagues demonstrated that an individual’s beliefs could influence how they experienced an objectively painful stimulus, even altering how pain is constructed in the brain.
“It’s difficult to overstate the transformative effect of this paper,” says Kevin Ochsner, a psychology professor at Columbia who nominated Wager for the prize. “It moved placebo effects from the realm of an interesting mind-body phenomenon that might not be real to a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry for cognition, emotion, and health.”
As Wager continued studying how beliefs shape our experience of pain, he sought a way to more precisely measure its physical manifestation in the brain. This led him to explore the use of machine learning methods to create what he termed a “neurologic pain signature,” a measure linking brain activity patterns in fMRI recordings with how people subjectively experienced pain.
At the time, fMRI studies highlighted the brain systems important for pain or emotion on average, but they didn’t provide a measure reliable enough to predict pain in individuals and specific enough to differentiate pain from other emotions.
Wager’s pain signature, detailed in a landmark 2013 study in the New England Journal of Medicine and validated across dozens of independent studies, resolved this limitation and allowed fMRI to be used as a biomarker. Wager and other scientists have since applied the signature approach to a range of other experiences, from drug craving to pleasure and fear.
“To have a method for peering inside the mind of a specific person with a metric that reliably indicates what they were experiencing was a dream of scientists and physicians made real,” says Ochsner.
Through the fMRI work, Wager became interested in chronic pain and whether it could be treated simply by thinking about pain differently. He led the first clinical trial of an innovative cognitive approach called pain reprocessing therapy which had dramatic, long-lasting effects on people with chronic back pain. Since then, more than 2,000 practitioners have been trained to treat chronic pain this way.
Beyond his research discoveries, Wager has developed new tools for analyzing brain imaging data that have unlocked entirely new areas of discovery. He created a set of widely used software tools for analyzing and visualizing fMRI data, including tools for identifying how neural pathways in one brain region influence another.
Drawing on some of these new tools, Wager and his colleagues were the first to show in a 2024 Nature Neuroscience study that the brain regions that give rise to emotion largely overlap with those governing emotional regulation, but that a few select areas are involved in regulation alone. The areas they identified could be future candidates for brain stimulation to treat disorders linked to emotional dysregulation such as depression or addiction.
With then-postdoc Tal Yarkoni, Wager also developed Neurosynth, an automated platform now widely used by scientists to run meta-analyses of brain imaging studies and identify patterns of reproducible findings.
Wager’s lab has produced an unusually large number of successful scientists—13 are now faculty researchers running labs of their own, including Dartmouth psychological and brain sciences professor Luke Chang.
In recent years, high-profile findings in psychology have failed to replicate, shaking confidence in the field. It’s one reason Wager has focused so heavily on quantitative approaches and using multiple independent datasets to validate conclusions.
“I wanted to interrogate my datasets and develop the quality checks and visualizations we needed to do to know what’s real in the data and what findings can be replicated,” he says.
He is still learning the math to do all this, he adds, laughing. “I took acting instead of calculus in college and have been catching up ever since.”