Bill Newsome is Harman Family Provostial Professor of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine and founding director of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. He 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.
Newsome received a B.S. in physics from Stetson University and a Ph.D. in biology from the California Institute of Technology. Among his honors are the Rank Prize for 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 for Brain and Mind at the University of California, San Diego. 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 National Institutes of Health BRAIN working group, charged with forming a national plan for neuroscience research in the United States.
