James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience; T&C Chen Brain-Machine Interface Center Leadership Chair; Director, T&C Chen Brain-Machine Interface Center
Research Summary
Professor Andersen studies the neurobiological underpinnings of brain processes including the senses of sight, hearing, balance and touch, the neural mechanisms of action, and the development of neural prosthetics.
Education and Career
Andersen obtained a Ph.D. in Physiology from the University of California, San Francisco with thesis advisor Michael Merzenich, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow with Vernon Mountcastle at the Johns Hopkins Medical School. He was Assistant and Associate Professor at the Salk Institute, Associate and Full Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and is currently the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering at Caltech and holds the T & C Chen Brain-machine Interface Center Leadership Chair.
He has trained 60 postdoctoral and doctoral students who now work in academia and industry; 35 currently hold tenure or tenure track faculty positions at major research universities throughout the world. He has published approximately 140 technical articles and edited two books.
Selected Awards
He is the recipient of a McKnight Foundation Scholars Award, Sloan Foundation Fellowship, Spencer Award from Columbia University, McKnight Technical Innovation in Neuroscience Award, McKnight Neuroscience Brain Disorders Award and the 2024 International Prize of Translational Neuroscience awarded by the Council of the Gertrud Reemtsma Foundation, Max Planck Society.
Caltech Affiliations
Andersen is currently the Director of the T & C Chen Brain-Machine Interface Center at Caltech and Director of the Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology at Caltech.
He is the vice-chair of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) and a member of the Internal Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC).
External Affiliations
Andersen has served as Director of the McDonnell/Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, regular member of the Vision B and COG Study Sections at NIH, Chair of the COG NIH Study Section, Chair of Section 3 (Anatomy, Neurobiology, Physiological and Pharmacological Sciences) of the Institute of Medicine, and Visiting Professor at the College de France.
He is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, Member of the National Academy of Medicine, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Member of the International Neuropsychological Symposium.
