Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system, its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developmental biology, cytology, psychology, physics, computer science, chemistry, medicine, statistics, and mathematical modeling to understand the fundamental and emergent properties of neurons, glia and neural circuits. The understanding of the biological basis of learning, memory, behavior, perception, and consciousness has been described by Eric Kandel as the "epic challenge" of the biological sciences.
Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental processes. It addresses the questions of how cognitive activities are affected or controlled by neural circuits in the brain. Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of both neuroscience and psychology, overlapping with disciplines such as behavioral neuroscience, cognitive psychology, physiological psychology and affective neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience relies upon theories in cognitive science coupled with evidence from neurobiology, and computational modeling.
Terrence Joseph Sejnowski is the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and is the director of the Crick-Jacobs center for theoretical and computational biology. He has performed pioneering research in neural networks and computational neuroscience.
Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle was an American neurophysiologist and Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. He discovered and characterized the columnar organization of the cerebral cortex in the 1950s. This discovery was a turning point in investigations of the cerebral cortex, as nearly all cortical studies of sensory function after Mountcastle's 1957 paper, on the somatosensory cortex, used columnar organization as their basis.
Michael S. Gazzaniga is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the USA, where he heads the new SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind. He is one of the leading researchers in cognitive neuroscience, the study of the neural basis of mind. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Academy of Sciences.
Solomon Halbert Snyder is an American neuroscientist who has made wide-ranging contributions to neuropharmacology and neurochemistry. He studied at Georgetown University, and has conducted the majority of his research at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Many advances in molecular neuroscience have stemmed from Snyder's identification of receptors for neurotransmitters and drugs, and elucidation of the actions of psychotropic agents. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1978 for his research on the opioid receptor, and is one of the most highly cited researchers in the biological and biomedical sciences, with the highest h-index in those fields for the years 1983–2002, and then from 2007 to 2019.
Walter Jackson Freeman III, was an American biologist, theoretical neuroscientist and philosopher who conducted research in rabbits' olfactory perception, using EEG. Based on a theoretical framework of neurodynamics that draws upon insights from chaos theory, he speculated that the currency of brains is primarily meaning, and only secondarily information.
The Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts & Sciences is an academic division of the Johns Hopkins University, a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. The school is located on the university's Homewood campus. It is the core of Johns Hopkins, offering comprehensive undergraduate education and graduate training in the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences.
Dale Purves is Geller Professor of Neurobiology Emeritus in the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences where he remains Research Professor with additional appointments in the department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, and the department of Philosophy at Duke University. He earned a B.A. from Yale University in 1960 and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1964. After further clinical training as a surgical resident at the Massachusetts General Hospital, service as a Peace Corps physician, and postdoctoral training at Harvard and University College London, he was appointed to the faculty at Washington University School of Medicine in 1973. He came to Duke in 1990 as the founding chair of the Department of Neurobiology at Duke Medical Center, and was subsequently Director of Duke's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (2003-2009) and also served as the Director of the Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders Program at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore (2009-2013).
Richard Lewis Huganir is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Neuroscience and Psychological and Brain Sciences, Director of the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience, and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Medicine Brain Science Institute at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He has joint appointments in the Department of Biological Chemistry and the Department of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Susana Martinez-Conde is a Spanish-American neuroscientist and science writer. She is a professor of ophthalmology, neurology, physiology, and pharmacology at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center, where she directs the Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience. She directed laboratories previously at the Barrow Neurological Institute and University College London. Her research bridges perceptual, cognitive, and oculomotor neuroscience. She is best known for her studies on illusions, eye movements and perception, neurological disorders, and attentional misdirection in stage magic.
The Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI) is a center for neuroscience research at Princeton University. Founded in the spring of 2004, the PNI serves as a "stimulus for teaching and research in neuroscience and related fields" and "places particular emphasis on the close connection between theory, modeling, and experimentation using the most advanced technologies." It often partners with Princeton University's departments of Psychology and Molecular Biology.
John E. Dowling is an American neuroscientist and Gordon and Llura Gund Research Professor of Neurosciences at Harvard University. He is best known for his seminal work in vision science, having elucidated the biochemistry of rhodopsin and development of the vertebrate retina, as well as diseases that affect vision such as vitamin A deficiency and retinitis pigmentosa. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972, the National Academy of Sciences in 1976, and the American Philosophical Society in 1992.
Michael Neil Shadlen is an American neuroscientist and neurologist, whose research concerns the neural mechanisms of decision-making. He has been Professor of Neuroscience at Columbia University since 2012 and a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator since 2000. He is a member of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science, a Principal Investigator at the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and National Academy of Sciences.
Amy Jo Bastian is an American neuroscientist, who has made important contributions to the neuroscience of sensorimotor control. From 2011 she has been a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. In 2015 Bastian was appointed Chief Science Officer at the Kennedy Krieger Institute. Bastian is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Brenda Carla Rapp professor and chair of the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience at Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Johns Hopkins University. In 2010, she was appointed joint editor-in-chief of the journal Cognitive Neuropsychology.
Gregory Francis Ball is a professor in the Department of Psychology and Dean of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is best known for his research into how seasonal hormonal shifts change the brain and reproductive behavior of different bird species.
Mary Elizabeth Blue is an American neurobiologist and computational neurologist. She is an associate professor of neurology and neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a research scientist in the neuroscience laboratory at Kennedy Krieger Institute.
Sliman Julien Bensmaia was a French-Algerian neuroscientist. An international expert in the neural encoding of sensory information and a pioneer in robotic neuroprosthetics, his nearly 100 academic articles in somatosensation have been cited over 10,000 times. He is the principal architect of the biomimetic approach to naturalistic restoration of the sensations of touch and proprioception in amputees and paralyzed patients.
