Event Details:
William Newsome
Harman Family Provostial Professor
Vincent V.C. Woo Director, Stanford Neurosciences Institute
Bio: Bill Newsome is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Professor of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He received a B.S. degree, summa cum laude, in physics from Stetson University (1974) and a Ph.D. in biology from the California Institute of Technology (1979) and did post-doctoral research at the National Eye Institute (1984). Dr. Newsome served on the faculty of the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at SUNY Stony Brook before moving to Stanford in 1988. Dr. Newsome is a leading investigator in the fields of visual and cognitive neuroscience. He has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying visual perception and simple forms of decision- making. Through his outstanding research, he has demonstrated the correlation between certain brain cells and the process of visual perception and how the brain interprets the signals arriving from the eye. Among his honors are the Rank Prize in Optoelectronics, the Spencer Award for highly original contributions to research in neuro-biology, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Dan David Prize of Tel Aviv University, the Karl Spencer Lashley Award of the American Philosophical Society, the Champalimaud Vision Award, and most recently, the Honorary Doctor of Science degree, State University of New York, School of Optometry. He has given numerous distinguished lectureships, including the 13th Annual Marr Lecture at the University of Cambridge, the 9th Annual Brenda Milner Lecture at McGill University, the Evnin Lecture at Princeton University and the 18th Annual Swartz Mind-Brain Lecture, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York. He was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 2000, and to the American Philosophical Society in 2011. His scientific publications include more than seventy research articles in scientific journals, including Journal of Neuroscience, Neuron, Nature, Journal of Neurophysiology, Science and PNAS.