Sebastian Seung

Sebastian Seung is Professor of Computational Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and External Member of the Max Planck Society. He received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Harvard University, and formerly worked at Bell Laboratories. His book Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are was hailed in the Wall Street Journal by Daniel Levitin as “the best lay book on brain science I've ever read.” His TED talk “I am my connectome” has over 500,000 views.

His laboratory at MIT is inventing technologies for finding connectomes, maps of connections between the brain's neurons. His goals are to understand perception, see the material basis of memory, and search for connectopathies, hypothetical “miswirings” of the brain associated with psychiatric disorders. He directs EyeWire, an online community that mobilizes the public to map the retinal connectome.