Salk researcher Terry Sejnowski elected to Institute of Medicine

Terry Sejnowski, Ph.D., professor and head of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute has been elected to the Institute of Medicine, the IOM has announced. Election to the IOM is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine and recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service.

"It is a great pleasure to welcome these distinguished and influential individuals to the Institute of Medicine," said IOM President Harvey V. Fineberg. "Members are elected through a highly selective process that recognizes people who have made major contributions to the advancement of the medical sciences, health care, and public health."

A Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, Dr. Sejnowski's lab is interested in understanding how the brain represents the world with information stored in neurons that are distributed across the brain and how new representations are formed through learning algorithms, which are rules for changing the strengths of connections between neurons.

He has created computer models of networks of neurons to explore the mechanisms underlying attention in the awake brain and brain rhythms in the sleeping brain and the links between them. These models also help explain how epilepsy arises from imbalances in brain circuits.

Sejnowski's laboratory has developed new ways of analyzing the sources of electrical and magnetic signals recorded from the scalp and the signals picked up by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain that are used routinely by laboratories throughout the world to study normal and abnormal brain function.