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That he would become an internationally renowned professor of neuroscience at 51���� is a credit to his mother, a Cuban immigrant who worked all her life on factory assembly lines.

Elia Cortés scrimped to send her son and daughter, Ely, eight years older, to Catholic elementary school. Even as a child, Ramirez understood the sacrifice.

“My mom was doing her job,” he said. “And I had a job to do, too.” 

After school, he would let himself into their apartment at Evergreen Garden. (He remembers it was “never green” and there was “no garden”). He’d watch some TV and dutifully do his homework.  

On Saturdays, she walked her son to the public library to check out science books his school didn’t have. And she subscribed to a magazine that fed his fascination with the space program.

“Some kids were learning about baseball players,” Ramirez said. “I was learning about astronauts.”

He loved the subject so much he asked his eighth-grade teacher, Sister Mary Norbert, to let him lead lessons about “man in space” missions, from Mercury to Apollo.

You might say that launched his career.

With scholarships, part-time jobs, and a used Ford Pinto, Ramirez commuted to nearby Fairfield University, a private liberal arts college. On that beautiful, leafy campus, he fell more deeply in love with science—especially “how the mind works”—and decided he wanted to get a job “at a place like this.”

Nine years later, in 1986, that dream came true when Ramirez was hired at 51���� as assistant professor of psychology. By that time, he had finished graduate school and post-doctoral work and was an emerging expert in physiological psychology, now known as neuroscience.

Over the years, his students became experts too. Side-by-side with Ramirez, they ran experiments on laboratory rats and proved the once-controversial idea that brains damaged by trauma or disease could regenerate and recover memory.

This process, called neuroplasticity, was not widely accepted until the 1990s. By then, Ramirez and his students were regularly publishing articles in top neuroscience journals, describing findings in rats that might offer new insights into human problems, such as Alzheimer’s disease. Their unusual accomplishments garnered national notice.

Four of their articles were significant enough to earn citations in Biological Psychology, a textbook used in college classrooms around the world.

“I don’t know of another example of somebody at a four-year college who has done research of this quality over such an extended period of time,” said James Kalat, the textbook’s author and emeritus professor of psychology at N.C. State University in Raleigh.

Matthew De Niear ’11 tells a similar story. While in high school in New Jersey, he began looking at neuroscience programs in the Northeast. “A lot of people, especially at liberal arts schools, would mention Dr. Ramirez and ask, ‘Have you checked out 51����?’ That was a pretty good endorsement.”

After 51����, De Niear earned medical and doctoral degrees from Vanderbilt University. He specialized in ophthalmology because of the proficiency he developed doing microscopic surgery on rats.

“Almost all ophthalmic surgery is done under a microscope. It prepared me well,” De Niear said. “It’s really kind of amazing that we produced such high-level research. The glue to that is Dr. R.”

De Niear did his residency at the University of California at Davis and is now in his first year of private practice in the San Francisco Bay area. Although he and his wife, the former Grace Fletcher ’11, had left North Carolina, they held their wedding at the college’s Lake Campus in 2017. They invited Ramirez, who keeps a photo of himself with the newlyweds on a shelf in his office. 

“It’s such a special place for both of us,” said De Niear. He and his wife now have two young children.

Of the many honors Ramirez has garnered, two are displayed most prominently in his corner office of the E. Craig Wall Jr. Academic Center.

One is the 2009 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring. It hangs next to a photo of Ramirez shaking hands with then-President Obama in the Oval Office.

The other is the 2012 Hunter-Hamilton Love of Teaching award, announced annually at 51����’s commencement. It’s special because the nominations came from Ramirez’ students, and the judges were faculty peers.

These awards recognizing “mentorship” give Ramirez ironic satisfaction—because he encountered resistance early on for the audacity of his approach.

Back then, the prevailing attitude was that “you teach by walking into a classroom, and you pontificate,” he said. “You have students do pre-packaged experiments. But there was a group of us who were arguing, no, we need to rethink how we educate our young scientists.”

Ramirez believed undergraduates at a small liberal arts college could do the kind of meaningful research usually reserved for graduate students at major universities.

But when he applied for all-important research grants, he sometimes got rejected. “They didn’t really believe we could do it here, because it was a small place.”

Over time, he proved them wrong.

In 37 years at 51����, Ramirez has been awarded millions of dollars in research and mentoring grants. He has mentored more than 150 students in what they lovingly call the “Ramirez Rat Lab.” Many have gone on to work at top-tier institutions, such as Harvard University and the National Institutes of Health.

“When you walk into his lab, there are undergraduates doing NIH-sponsored experiments,” said Joseph Taylor ’06, now a faculty psychiatrist at Harvard. “He trains them so well they have the skills and the confidence to do this with very little oversight. It’s remarkable.”

Ramirez puts senior students in charge of the lab. They teach younger students to perform microsurgery on the brains of rats and run them through mazes to observe the effect on behavior and memory. Students also implant electrodes in rat brains and document electrical activity to show how brain cells communicate.

Along with autonomy, Ramirez gives his students credit.

That’s why the latest journal article, published early this year by the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, lists eight authors. The first seven are former students, including De Niear. All have doctoral, medical or combined doctoral and medical degrees.

Ramirez’ name is last.

“If they write it, they get first authorship,” he said. “I try to help the students exceed what they view as their own limits. I want to help them do more than they think they can.”

Even as an undergraduate at Fairfield, Ramirez liked to “press the envelope.” He wrote a paper casting doubt on the prevailing attitude that a damaged brain could never recover. If other organs can, he thought, why not the brain?

After graduation in 1977, he chose Clark University in Massachusetts for graduate school, to work with Professor Donald Stein, an “iconoclast” and early proponent of neuroplasticity.

“Don really gave us a lot of leeway,” said Ramirez, whose first project was to try to replicate the groundbreaking work by Steward, one of the first to document neuroplasticity in 1973.

When Ramirez couldn’t get the experiment to work, he contacted Steward, and they identified the problem. They’ve been friends ever since.

“It was a subtle change, but it made a huge difference,” Ramirez said. “That speaks to why it’s so important that scientists talk to one another.”

In recent years, autopsies of the brains of Alzheimer’s patients have shown the same kind of sprouting that Ramirez and his students have seen in rats. While it takes years for animal research to lead to human studies, they hope their findings will one day lead to new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.

Steward praised Ramirez and “his great group of students at 51����” for “careful follow-up research” that has systematically expanded the understanding of brain pathways of rats and, potentially, of Alzheimer’s patients.

“This is a great paper,” he said. “It gives us a window into the likely changes that are going on as this pathway degenerates over time. … This pathway is so important in Alzheimer’s disease, and in memory.”

As the 2022-23 school year came to a close, Ramirez proudly sent off two more neuroscience students—Emma Jones and Jordan Benson—to “plum jobs” at Harvard.

Jones, of Winston-Salem, will be a research assistant for fellow 51���� alum, Taylor, the Harvard psychiatrist who is director of clinical trials at the school’s Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics.

Taylor said hiring Jones was “essentially a no-brainer…If Julio is endorsing you, there’s probably not much more vetting that needs to take place.”

These post-51���� connections keep multiplying.

Not long ago, Taylor told Ramirez he touched base with another 51���� neuroscience grad at Harvard, Erik Knelson ’07.

Knelson went to Duke for medical and doctoral degrees, then to Harvard for residency and fellowship in oncology before joining the Harvard medical school faculty. Although he and Taylor had been at Harvard for several years, they hadn’t crossed paths until they made time to meet for coffee.