CCN Director Eero Simoncelli Awarded Swartz Prize

The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) announced today that Center for Computational Neuroscience (CCN) director Eero Simoncelli will receive its prestigious Swartz Prize, which it annually awards to “an individual whose activities have produced a significant cumulative contribution to theoretical models or computational methods in neuroscience or who has made a particularly noteworthy recent advance in theoretical or computational neuroscience.” The prize selection committee particularly noted Simoncelli’s groundbreaking work on understanding how the brain processes sensory information and uses it to guide decisions and actions.

Endowed by the Swartz Foundation, the Swartz Prize provides winners with a $30,000 cash prize and travel to SfN’s annual meeting. Simoncelli will accept the award on October 5 as part of a presidential special lecture at this year’s meeting.

Simoncelli is an internationally recognized pioneer in theoretical and computational neuroscience whose research has illuminated how the visual system extracts statistics of natural images to create representations of the world around us. He has established leading models of visual motion and texture perception as well as models of auditory perception to represent what he calls ‘sound textures.’

Simoncelli earned his B.S. in physics from Harvard University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the recipient of several prestigious honors, including being named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and a Sloan Research Fellow. He is also the winner of an Engineering Emmy for developing a method to measure the visual quality of images.

In addition to his role as scientific director of CCN, Simoncelli is an investigator with the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain. He also serves as the Silver Professor of Neural Science, Mathematics, Data Science and Psychology at New York University.