Hopfield Receives Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience
For immediate release.
HOPFIELD RECEIVES SWARTZ PRIZE FOR THEORETICAL AND COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE
NEW ORLEANS — The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) has awarded the Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience to John J. Hopfield,of Princeton University. Supported by The Swartz Foundation, this prize, which includes $25,000, recognizes an individual who has produced a significant cumulative contribution to theoretical models or computational methods in neuroscience. The award was presented during Neuroscience 2012, SfN’s annual meeting and the world’s largest source of emerging news about brain science and health.
“The Society is pleased to recognize the exceptional contributions of Dr. Hopfield to the field of computational neuroscience,” said Moses V. Chao, PhD, president of SfN. “His rigorous and elegant mathematical models started a ‘neural network’ revolution in the field of neuroscience, which continues to this day.”
Hopfield has contributed greatly to the field of computational neuroscience throughout his career. His research, combining neurobiology, physics, and electrical engineering showed how the collective computational power of networks could perform previously mysterious functions, like associative memory. He also demonstrated how new functions could emerge in networks. The “Hopfield network” has served as a key paradigm for modeling neural networks.
Hopfield earned his PhD at Cornell University and is currently Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, and the Martin A. and Helen Chooljian Visiting Professor in Biology at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J.
The Society for Neuroscience is an organization of more than 42,000 basic scientists and clinicians who study the brain and nervous system.
