H. Sebastian Seung
Professor of computational neuroscience, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
areas of expertise: connectomics, machine learning, computational neuroscience
Sebastian Seung is professor of computational neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Department of Physics; investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and external member of the Max Planck Society.
He received his PhD in theoretical physics from Harvard University. Before joining the MIT faculty, he was a member of the Theoretical Physics Department at Bell Laboratories. He has been a Sloan Research Fellow, a Packard Fellow in Science and Engineering, and a McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience Scholar.
He serves on the Advisory Committee of the Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the Advisory Board and Steering Committee of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His laboratory is inventing technologies for finding the connectome — the neural equivalent of the genome, comprising all the connections between the brain’s neurons. In 2007, he introduced connectomics to thousands of neuroscientists in his presidential lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. To introduce this emerging field to the general public, he is writing a book that will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the fall of 2011.
request an interview: Sarah McDonnell | 617-253-8923 | s_mcd@mit.edu