creators

Terrence Sejnowski - Salk computational neuroscientist

Terrence Sejnowski holds the Francis Crick Chair at the Salk Institute and co-directs UC San Diego's Institute for Neural Computation. Brain Prize 2024.

Terrence (Terry) Sejnowski is an American computational neuroscientist and one of the founders of modern neural network research. Born in Cleveland in 1947, he took his PhD in physics at Princeton in 1978 under John Hopfield, with a dissertation titled "A Stochastic Model of Nonlinearly Interacting Neurons", and was a postdoctoral fellow in biology at Princeton and in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. In 1985, while on the faculty at Johns Hopkins, he published the Boltzmann machine with David Ackley and Geoffrey Hinton, an early algorithm for learning in multilayered networks; two years later he and Charles Rosenberg described NETtalk, a network that learned to turn written English into speech. At the Salk Institute he is professor and head of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and holds the Francis Crick Chair, endowed by the J.W. Kieckhefer Foundation in 2004. At UC San Diego he is a professor of biology and co-directs the Institute for Neural Computation. He was an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1991 to 2017. He was the founding editor-in-chief of Neural Computation, whose first issue MIT Press published in spring 1989. He has been president of the NeurIPS Foundation since 1993, and writes the Substack newsletter Brains and AI. In 2024 he shared the Brain Prize with Larry Abbott and Haim Sompolinsky for work in computational and theoretical neuroscience; in 2025 he was elected to the Royal Society and the American Philosophical Society, and the Salk Institute also lists an NIH Director's Pioneer Award that year.

Specialization

computational neuroscience, neural networks, independent component analysis

Country

United States