William Newsome

Harman Family Provostial Professor and Professor of Neurobiology and, by courtesy, of Psychology

Ph.D., California Inst. of Technology, Neurobiology (1980)
Academic Appointments
Professor, Neurobiology
Professor (By courtesy), Psychology
Member, Bio-X
Member, Maternal & Child Health Research Institute (MCHRI)
Member, Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute
Honors & Awards
Henry J. Kaiser Award for Excellence in Teaching, Students of the Stanford University School of Medicine (1991, 1997)
Golden Brain Award, Minerva Foundation (1992)
The Rank Prize in Optoelectronics, The Rank Prize Funds, London (1992)
MERIT Award, National Eye Institute (1993)
W. Alden Spencer Award for highly original contributions to research in neurobiology, Columbia University (1994)
Fogarty International Senior Research Fellowship, Fogarty International Center, NIH (1995)
Guggenheim Fellowship, Guggenheim Foundation (1995)
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (1997)
Elected to membership, National Academy of Sciences, USA (2000)
Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, American Psychological Association (2002)
Bill Newsome is the Harman Family Provostial Professor of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and the Founding Director of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. He received a B.S. degree in physics from Stetson University and a Ph.D. in biology from the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Newsome is a leading investigator in systems and cognitive neuroscience. He has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying visual perception and simple forms of decision making. Among his honors are the Rank Prize in Optoelectronics, the Spencer Award, 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, and the Champalimaud Vision Award. His distinguished lectureships include the 13th Annual Marr Lecture at the University of Cambridge the 9th Annual Brenda Milner Lecture at McGill University, and most recently, the Distinguished Visiting Scholar lectures at the Kavli Institute of Brain and Mind, UCSD. He was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 2000, and to the American Philosophical Society in 2011. Newsome co-chaired the NIH BRAIN working group, charged with forming a national plan for neuroscience research in the United States.

Contact

Telephone
(650) 725-5814

Research Interests