Lynn Nadel is a cognitive neuroscientist whose work has focused on the functions of the hippocampus in memory and spatial cognition, leading to significant contributions in the study of stress and memory, sleep and memory, memory reconsolidation, and the mental retardation observed in Down syndrome. He has promulgated, with collaborators, two highly influential theories: the cognitive map theory of hippocampal function, and the multiple trace theory of memory.

Lynn was raised in New York City, went to Stuyvesant High School, and then McGill University, where he received his BSc, MSc and PhD. He did an NIMH-sponsored postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of Jan Bures amd Olga Buresova in Prague, Czechoslovakia, from 1967-70. He then spent six years as a Lecturer in the Anatomy Department at University College London, followed by a year at the VA hospital in San Diego, two years in the Psychology Department at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, and 5 years at UC Irvine, before settling at the University of Arizona, where he has served as Department Head, Interim Dean, and Chair of the Faculty in the 35 years he has been at Arizona. He is a Fellow of the Association of Psychological Societies, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Society of Experimental Psychologists, an Honorary Member of the European Brain and Behavior Society, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.