Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Meet Terrence J. Sejnowski - Primary Source: PRINCETON ALUMNI WEEKLY
San Diego, CA
Graduate Alumni
A pioneer in the field of computational neuroscience and regarded by many as the world’s foremost theoretical brain scientist, Terrence J. Sejnowski has devoted much of his life to gaining a deeper understanding of the brain mechanisms underlying behavior. He has done groundbreaking work.
Sejnowski is the Francis Crick Chair at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and is an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is one of only ten living people to be a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine.
Known as the founder of the science of neural computation that combines the principles of physics, computer science, and neural modeling to studying behavior and the brain, Sejnowski is particularly interested in the hippocampus, which is believed to play a key role in learning and memory, and the cerebral cortex. His laboratory uses experimental and modeling techniques to gain information about how the human brain is capable of learning and storing memories. This research may eventually provide clues to combating Alzheimer's disease and other disorders that affect the ability to remember faces, names, places, and events.
Sejnowski has over 500 scientific publications and several books to his credit, including The Computational Brain, a best-selling textbook at MIT Press, and Liars, Lovers and Heroes, a trade book about how the brain works.
A graduate of Case Western Reserve, Sejnowski went to Princeton to study General Relativity with legendary physicist John Wheeler, earning his MA in 1970 and his PhD in 1978. He points out, though, "Princeton gave me the freedom to explore other interests, and I took courses in biology, psychology, and history of science, which strongly influenced my career." A mentor in the physics department encouraged him to pursue his burgeoning interest in biology.
"My first faculty position was in the Biophysics Department at the Johns Hopkins University, where I pioneered the field of neural networks, which was a new type of computer based on the architecture of the brain," he says. His computer program, called NETtalk, "learned how to pronounce English words, which I demonstrated on the Today Show." He says much of the technology for things like noise cancellation in cell phones and facial expression recognition originated from research from his lab.
Sejnowski founded Neural Computation, which is a prominent research journal. He is also the President of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Foundation, "which organizes the largest annual machine learning conference. This field is important for many industries that rely on big data, including search engines at Google and Microsoft and recommendation systems at Amazon and Netflix."
He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Searle Scholars Program, which funds research of young scientists, and on the Research Council for the State University of New York, as well as scientific advisory boards of Syntaptics, Illumina, the Gulbenkian Foundation, and others. Sejnowski has a long list of awards and honors, including the Wright Prize for interdisciplinary research from Harvey Mudd College, the Hebb Prize, and the Neural Pioneer Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Sejnowski has worked with many students over the years and is listed as the most connected neuroscientist at neurotree.org, which keeps track of mentors and students, and he remains close with members of Princeton’s Physics faculty. "I highly value my colleagues at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, which is at the forefront of a new era in neuroscience research that will lead to a deeper understanding of the brain and behavior."
Source: Princeton Alumni Weekly, online at https://paw.princeton.edu
Why source_reference so difficult? not quite sure, could be it was a bad day for someone young to pretend she's all grown up.
Source: Princeton Alumni Weekly, online at https://paw.princeton.edu
Why source_reference so difficult? not quite sure, could be it was a bad day for someone young to pretend she's all grown up.
