William J. Keller, Ph.D., professor of medical neurosciences has been teaching medicals students and residents for over 30 years. He is internationally recognized for his many contributions to the advancement in medical education and medical neurosciences.
A native of Pompano Beach, Florida he attended the University of Florida, Gainesville where he earned a BA in psychology and was actively engaged in neurology and neuropsychology research, investigating unilateral neglect and cerebral lateralization of information processing. Upon graduation he moved to the frozen Midwest, where he earned a MA in clinical psychology at Ball State University, located in Muncie, Indiana, and completed research investigating the reversal of cerebral asymmetries, as a function of visual half-field presentation of verbal and spatial stimuli. Upon graduation he moved to Houston Texas to work at the Texas Research Institute of Mental Sciences (now a part of the University of Texas Medical School), located in the heart of the Texas Medical Center, and completed research focusing upon neurocognitive and neuroelectrophysiological changes appearing in early stages of Alzheimer’s disease and in the severely violent criminal juvenile offender. He earned a Ph.D. in clinical neuropsychology from the University of Houston, where his research focused on the neuroelectrophysiological changes appearing in early Alzheimer’s disease and mood disorders resulting from neurologically based movement disorders.
He relocated to California, upon completion of the Ph.D. degree, where he continued research into human neurocognitive processing while serving as Co-Director of the Neurocognitive Laboratory, University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. Soon he discovered his enjoyment in teaching residents and medical students. After providing clinical and consulting services for over 15 years, in both outpatient and inpatient hospital settings, and teaching only part-time, he returned to the medical school classroom full-time. He has been teaching medical neurosciences to first and second-year medical students for the past 20 years and has remained active in maximizing student success, within very demanding medical school curricula.
One of his many joys and rewards associated with teaching and training medical students is the opportunity to work with medical students to identify an area of interest to them, conceptualize, design, analyze, and successfully execute a meaningful research project, and then present their findings to the professional medical community, by way of presenting at national society meetings and publication in professional journals. He shares the beliefs of most faculty, educating and training medical students is so much more than disseminating content and process information within the classroom. It is a process of providing resources and opportunities for medical students to develop academically, professionally, and personally to ensure excellence in medical care to all future patients.