Clinton Woolsey was one of the first early neurophysiologists in the United States with a broad interest in experimentally defining various kinds of functional and structural organization in the brains of a variety of mammals. Woolsey pioneered the electrophysiological mapping of cerebral cortex. After receiving his MD at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, he became a research physiologist in the Department of Physiology as an assistant to Dr. Philip Bard (who wrote the major textbook of Physiology used by Medical Schools in the United States at the time). Woolsey was recruited by the University of Wisconsin to set up a Laboratory of Neurophysiology there. This was one of the few basic research laboratories devoted to training in neurophysiology that existed in the late 1940's.

Woolsey had already developed an international reputation for the broad scope of his work and interests in comparative neurophysiology and neuroanatomy. He was one of the first neuroscientists to systematically map sensory and motor areas of the cerebral cortex from a comparative point of view. Woolsey developed methods for data portrayal (e.g. figurine maps) that easily allowed the reader to see how different sensory surfaces (skin, retina, cochlea) projected topographically to central brain regions.

Woolsey encouraged a large number of enthusiastic and curious young scientists to join one or another of his research groups. He gave generously of his time and attention to helping his apprentices build their careers. It turns out that this period (when research funding was becoming readily available), was ideal for curious young men and women to enter the field of neuroscience. In Woolsey's labs at Wisconsin, inquiring students were given freedom and encouragement to conduct basic research projects under his guidance, and to work with Woolsey himself on experiments of his interest. Functional localization was a major thrust of Woolsey's life's work. He and all his students were devoted to discovering major principles by which the brains of mammals are organized into nuclei, simple circuits, systems and networks. He made the entire brain his field of study. The breadth of Woolsey's interests was surely a major character that attracted so many people from non neural fields to become neuroscientists in search of the neural mechanisms of behavior and perception.

Jerzy Rose

To assist him in localizing neuroanatomical structures that had been surgically removed, or recorded from, Woolsey invited Dr. Konrad Akert, from Switzerland to join the laboratory of Neurophysiology to become the neuroanatomist in charge. Later, Dr. Woolsey recruited Dr. Jerzy E. Rose to join this expanding Laboratory when he had secured funding to design and build two floors in the new Medical Sciences Building being built as an adjunct to the existing Medical School training Facilities.

Assembling a brain collection at Wisconsin began with the impetus of Clinton Woolsey, but was given additional guidance by Dr. Konrad Akert, who was one of the first neuroanatomists in Dr. Woolsey's laboratories.