Prof. James George Pfaus, Ph.D.

James Pfaus, Ph.D. received his bachelor’s degree in psychology (1983) from the American University in Washington, D.C., and his master’s (1986) and doctoral degrees (1990) in neuroscience and psychology from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, under the supervision of Drs. Boris Gorzalka, John Pinel, and Anthony Phillips. After a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in molecular biology in the laboratory of Dr. Donald Pfaff at The Rockefeller University in New York, he was accepted into the Center for the Study of Behavioral Neurobiology in the Department of Psychology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, where he became a full professor in 2004. In 2018, he left Concordia to pursue research as a visiting scholar with longtime collaborators at the Instituto de Investigaciones Cerebrales at the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Mexico. Since 2021, he has been working at the Department of Psychology and Life Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague, and as a senior researcher in the Sexual Neuroscience Laboratory at the Center for Sexual Health and Interventions of the NUDZ.

His research is conducted on rats and humans in an attempt to understand how the brain and its neurochemical systems are organized for basic sexual responses such as arousal, desire, sexual pleasure and orgasm, and sexual inhibition and disgust. His work has illuminated the neural and molecular mechanisms by which conditioned sexual responses potentiate sexual preferences and reproduction and how they contribute to the development of fetishes and paraphilias. He has received several prestigious international awards for this work.

He has published more than 225 peer-reviewed scientific papers and book chapters on the neurobiology of sexual behavior in women and men, and his work has led to the development of new drugs to treat sexual dysfunctions and ways to offset the effects of medications that have debilitating side effects on sexuality. He has given hundreds of interviews on television, radio, and social media, and his work has been featured in films and documentaries. He is the editor-in-chief of Current Sexual Health Reports, a former associate editor-in-chief of Sexual Medicine Reviews and the Journal of Sexual Medicine, and he serves on the editorial boards of other scientific journals in the fields of sexuality, neuroscience, and pharmacology. He is a member of the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health and recently became president of the International Academy of Sex Research.