Dr. David Heeger stands as a preeminent figure in the interdisciplinary field of computational neuroscience, currently holding the distinguished position of Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University. His academic journey began with a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, followed by a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the same institution in 1987, establishing an early foundation that would bridge quantitative disciplines with brain science. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT Media Lab and serving as a research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, he joined Stanford University as Assistant Professor before ascending to Associate Professor. His transition to New York University marked the beginning of a highly influential period where he established a renowned research program that has consistently pushed the boundaries between engineering, psychology, and neuroscience.
Dr. Heeger's seminal contribution to the field is the normalization model, a foundational theory of neural processing that has profoundly shaped our understanding of how the brain processes visual information and performs computations across multiple cognitive domains. His groundbreaking work has generated over 55,000 citations according to Google Scholar, reflecting the widespread impact of his theoretical frameworks across multiple scientific disciplines including neuroscience, psychology, and computer vision. In recent years, he has developed the Oscillatory Recurrent Gated Neural Integrator Circuits framework, published in PNAS in 2019, which represents a unifying theoretical approach to understanding neural dynamics across brain regions and modalities. This work addresses a fundamental challenge in neuroscience by proposing how canonical neural computations can support diverse cognitive processes, potentially serving as a general theory of brain function analogous to Maxwell's Equations in physics.
Beyond his theoretical contributions, Dr. Heeger has made significant experimental advances through psychophysics and functional magnetic resonance imaging studies that have illuminated our understanding of visual cortex organization, visual awareness, motion perception, attention, and working memory. He actively bridges academic research with practical applications as Chief Scientific Officer of Anthic and co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Epistemic AI, organizations dedicated to translating neuroscience insights into performance optimization tools and AI research assistants for biomedical discovery. His laboratory continues to pioneer innovative approaches to understanding cortical circuit function, with current research focusing on developing comprehensive computational models that integrate neural, cognitive, and behavioral data. As a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2013, Dr. Heeger remains at the forefront of efforts to establish a unified theoretical framework for brain function that could transform both basic neuroscience and artificial intelligence research.
