James Olds (May 30, 1922 – August 21, 1976) was an American psychologist who co-discovered the pleasure center of the brain with Peter Milner while he was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University in 1954.
His father, Leland Olds, later became chairman of the Federal Power Commission under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
His undergraduate years were interrupted by military service in the U.S. Army during the Second World War as part of the Persian Gulf Command.
Following the war, Olds went on to get his Ph.D. at Harvard University in the Department of Social Relations under Professor Richard L. Solomon.
[7] He left Michigan in 1969 to become the Bing Professor of Behavioral Biology at the California Institute of Technology[8] where he continued his research and led a large lab until his death in a swimming accident in August 1976.