Prof. Terrence J. Sejnowski

Prof. Terrence J. Sejnowski

Terrence J. Sejnowski is a pioneer in the field of computational neuroscience.  He is the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory.  He is also an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and a Professor of Biology and Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where he is the Director of the Institute for Neural Computation.

The goal of Dr. Sejnowski's laboratory is to understand the computational resources of brains, and to build linking principles from brain to behavior using computational models.

Among Dr. Sejnowski's interests is the hippocampus, believed to play a major role in learning and memory; and the cerebral cortex, which holds our knowledge of the world and how to interact with it. In his lab, Prof. Sejnowski's team uses sophisticated electrical and chemical monitoring techniques to measure changes that occur in the connections among nerve cells in the hippocampus during a simple form of learning. They use the results of these studies to instruct large-scale computers to mimic how these nerve cells work. By studying how the resulting computer simulations can perform operations that resemble the activities of the hippocampus, Prof. Sejnowski hopes to gain new knowledge of how the human brain is capable of learning and storing memories. This knowledge ultimately may provide medical specialists with critical clues to combating Alzheimer's disease and other disorders that rob people of the critical ability to remember faces, names, places and events.