Terrence Sejnowski receives Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience

The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) will award the Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience to Terrence Sejnowski, PhD, of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. The $25,000 prize, supported by The Swartz Foundation, recognizes an individual who has produced a significant cumulative contribution to theoretical models or computational methods in neuroscience. The award will be presented during Neuroscience 2015, SfN's annual meeting and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health.

"Dr. Sejnowski is deserving of this prize for his role in founding and growing the field of computational neuroscience, his commitment to training and mentoring young scientists, and his many major research discoveries," SfN President Steven Hyman said. "It is an honor to recognize his tireless efforts to understand the computational resources of the brain and to computationally model how brain activity becomes behavior."

Sejnowski has demonstrated significant breadth in his research career. He has developed artificial neural network models as well as learning models for birdsong and neuroeconomics. He helped develop the algorithm for independent component analysis, a method now widely used in many fields. In addition to his efforts to bring attention and funding to the field of computational neuroscience through organizing conferences and consulting for numerous agencies and panels, Sejnowski always found time to run experiments in his lab. These ranged from investigating the pacemaker neurons of electric fish, to modeling the changes that occur in the hippocampus during learning, to understanding how sensory information is represented in the cerebral cortex.

Sejnowski earned his PhD at Princeton University and taught at Johns Hopkins University before joining the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Salk Institute. He was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and now holds the Francis Crick Chair at the Salk Institute.

Provided by Society for Neuroscience