John Polich learned to drive a tractor on his family's Iowa farm, but he had little interest in farming. Looking at the field's lone cottonwood tree, he was more intrigued with how his brain deciphered that the object was a tree, or that it was green. Polich spent the next 30 years in academia as a cognitive neuroscientist studying memory and the brain's response to disease and addiction. Now, with a late career move into industry at NeuroFocus, he hopes to make use of the brain-wave activity techniques he's helped to develop. See CV

Polich's propensity for contemplation led him to a Benedictine seminary in Conception, Missouri, for college. But after two years, he decided he wasn't monk material. He transferred to the University of Iowa, where he majored in experimental psychology. “I wanted to understand how the brain produced cognition,” he says. In just eight months, he completed a master's degree in cognitive psychology at Wayne State University, Michigan.

As one of the first PhD candidates in cognitive psychology at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, Polich did some of the earliest recording of brain waves. He later did a postdoc at the University of Illinois with Emanuel Donchin, a leader in the use of specific brain-wave signals to assess attention and memory.

Keen to deal with patients, he built his own lab at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla to study patients in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. But, as he was not a physician, he found it difficult to recruit large numbers. So he changed his focus and spent 20 years studying how drugs such as marijuana, tobacco, caffeine and ecstasy affect neurotransmitters.

The increasing struggle for grant money helped lure him to NeuroFocus, a company interested in applying his brain-wave techniques to marketing-effectiveness studies — otherwise known as 'neuromarketing'. “Finding a whole new way to apply brain-wave techniques is an exciting and challenging career move,” he says. Indeed, NeuroFocus is expanding to meet demand for neuromarketing expertise.

Bob Knight, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and chief scientific adviser to NeuroFocus, says Polich's work in attention, emotion and memory covers three cardinal facets of neuromarketing. “John is regarded as a meticulous researcher, and as we use science to help grow this industry, he and his impeccable scientific record will help us make sure our research is conducted at the highest level possible,” says Knight.