Terrence Sejnowski
Terrence Sejnowski
Terrence Sejnowski earned his BS in Physics from Case Western Reserve University, and his PhD in Physics from Princeton University. He was a postdoctoral fellow in Biology at Princeton University and then in Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. He is currently professor and head of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and the Francis Crick Chair at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, USA.
Terrence Sejnowski is a pioneer in the field of computational neuroscience. Among other things, he is interested in 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, 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, 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.
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