Terrence Sejnowski is a computational neuroscientist who is a Professor and Laboratory Head of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute, where he holds the Francis Crick Chair. Trained as a physicist, with a PhD from Princeton, he became a leading figure in using computer models to understand how the brain processes information.
Sejnowski worked at the intersection of neuroscience and the early neural network revival. With Geoffrey Hinton he co-invented the Boltzmann machine, a stochastic neural network that learns probability distributions over its inputs and was an important conceptual bridge toward modern deep learning. With Charles Rosenberg he built NETtalk, a network that learned to convert English text into speech and, as it trained, produced babbling that gradually resolved into words, a vivid early demonstration of learning in neural networks.
He helped found the field’s institutions as well, co-founding the journal Neural Computation and the conference that became NeurIPS, the largest gathering in machine learning. His career illustrates how deeply the study of biological and artificial neural networks have been intertwined.