Professor Terrence Sejnowski

Salk Institution for Biological Studies
Email: terry@salk.edu
Web: click here

Terrence Sejnowski is an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Professor at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory. He is also Professor of Biological Sciences and Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Physics, Neurosciences, Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where he is Director of the Institute for Neural Computation.

Dr. Sejnowski received B.S. in physics from the Case-Western Reserve University, M.A. in physics from Princeton University, and a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1978. From 1978-1979 Dr Sejnowski was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology at Princeton University and from 1979-1982 he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. In 1982 he joined the faculty of the Department of Biophysics at the Johns Hopkins University, where he achieved the rank of Professor before moving to San Diego in 1988. He has had a long-standing affiliation with the California Institute of Technology, as a Wiersma Visiting Professor of Neurobiology in 1987, as a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar in 1993 and as a part-time Visiting Professor 1995-1998.

The long-range goal of Dr Sejnowski's research is to build linking principles from brain to behavior using computational models. This goal is being pursued with a combination of theoretical and experimental approaches at several levels of investigation ranging from the biophysical level to the systems level. Hippocampal and cortical slice preparations are being used to explore the properties of single neurons and synapses. Biophysical models of electrical and chemical signal processing within neurons are used as an adjunct to physiological experiments. The dynamics of network models are studied to explore how populations of neurons interact during states of alertness and sleep. His laboratory has developed new methods for analyzing the sources for electrical and magnetic signals recorded from the scalp and hemodynamic signals from functional brain imaging.