James Pfaus

Professor Jim Pfaus, PhD, is a basic and preclinical researcher in the neuroscience and psychology of sexual behavior and neuroendocrine function in the Department of Psychology and Life Sciences at Charles University in Prague and director of research for the Center for Sexual Health and Intervention at the Czech National Institute of Mental Health. Originally from the US, he received his bachelors in Psychology in 1983 from The American University in Washington, DC, then his PhD in Neuroscience in 1990 from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC Canada. He did a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship in molecular neurobiology in the laboratory of Dr. Donald Pfaff at Rockefeller University in New York City, after which he became a Professor of Neuroscience in the Center for Studies in Behavioral Neurobiology, Department of Psychology, at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada from 1992 to 2018. He left Concordia in 2018 and was a visiting researcher at the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa with colleagues in the Instituto de Investigaciones Cerebrales from 2019 to 2021, after which he moved to Prague in the Czech Republic to become a Professor of Neuroscience at Charles University and Research Director at the Center for Sexual Health and Intervention, where his laboratory is located. Jim’s research uses both rats and humans to understand how the brain and its neurochemical and neuroendocrine systems are organized for basic sexual responses like arousal, desire, sexual pleasure and orgasm, and sexual inhibition and disgust. His work has also shed light on the neural and molecular mechanisms by which conditioned sexual responses potentiate sexual preferences and reproduction, and how they figure in the development of fetishes and paraphilias. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed scientific papers and book chapters on the neurobiology of sexual behavior in both females and males, and his work has led to the formulation of new drugs to treat sexual dysfunctions and ways to compensate for psychiatric medications that have debilitating sexual side effects. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Current Sexual Health Reports, Associate editor of Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, past associate editor of Sexual Medicine Reviews, and the Journal of Sexual Medicine, and sits on the editorial boards of other scientific journals in sexuality, neuroscience, and pharmacology. He is a Fellow of the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health and a Past President of the International Academy of Sex Research.