William Newsome

Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Professor of Neurobiology

Dr. 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 and a Ph.D. in biology from the California Institute of Technology. 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 sensory and cognitive neuroscience. He has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of how the primate brain mediates visual perception, and is currently attempting to unravel the neural mechanisms underlying simple decision processes within the cerebral cortex. Among his honors are the Rank Prize in Optoelectronics, the Spencer Award for highly original contributions to research in neurobiology from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, and two Kaiser Awards for excellence in teaching from the students of the Stanford University School of Medicine. He recently delivered the 13th Annual Marr Lecture at the University of Cambridge and the King Solomon Lectures in Mechanisms of Animal Behavior at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 2000, he was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences.