Schultz is professor of neuroscience at the University of Cambridge and has a graduate degree in medicine from the University of Heidelberg in Germany. At Cambridge, Schultz and his colleagues are researching how "rapid, global, evaluative and supervising neural signals may play a role in decision-making and choice behavior."

The Danish Lundbeck Foundation have awarded the Brain Prize to Schultz, Peter Dayan and Ray Dolan this year. The award comes with one million Euros in prize money, which the three researchers will share. Schultz, Dayan and Dolan received the prize, because their multidisciplinary work on how learning is related to reward in the human brain is vital for understanding disorders in decision-making.

Brain Prize winner Wolfram Schultz

In other words: the results Schultz and the other award winners yield could help doctors and therapists improve their understanding of issues like gambling, drug addiction, compulsive behavior and even schizophrenia.

The Brain Prize is in its seventh year. The Lundbeck Foundation established the prize to honor "highly original and influential advances in any area of neuroscience … and clinical research on the causes, treatment and prevention of neurological and psychiatric disorders."