David J. Freedman

Bio

Dr. David J. Freedman is The Stahl Professor of Neurobiology in the Wallman Society of Fellows and Chair of The Department of Neurobiology at The University of Chicago, where is also a member of the graduate programs in Neurobiology and Computational Neuroscience. He is also a Faculty Affiliate of the Data Science Institut and serves at one of the Faculty Leads of The Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship Program at UChicago. Dr. Freedman earned his Bachelor's degree from the University of Rochester, and his Ph.D. in Systems Neuroscience from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) working in Earl Miller's laboratory. He completed postdoctoral fellowships at MIT with Earl Miller and Harvard Medical School with John Assad before joining the faculty at The University of Chicago in 2008. The central goal of Dr. Freedman's research is to understand the brain mechanisms of higher order cognitive and perceptual functions, such as learning, memory, and decision making. His laboratory uses advanced neurophysiological techniques to monitor the activity patterns of populations of neurons in multiple brain areas during visual learning, memory and recognition tasks. His group also employs modeling and machine learning approaches to explore the computations performed by neural networks in order to perform cognitively demanding tasks.