The MacArthur Foundation recently announced its 2019 MacArthur Fellows – “26 extraordinary MacArthur Fellows demonstrate the power of individual creativity to reframe old problems, spur reflection, create new knowledge, and better the world for everyone. They give us reason for hope, and they inspire us all to follow our own creative instincts.”
The MacArthur Fellows program grants each recipient a no-strings-attached stipend of $625,000 in order to support his or her own creative and professional ambitions. The program features scientists, artists, historians, and writers.
The 2019 Fellows class features one computer scientist: Joshua Tenanbaum, a Cognitive Scientist in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Joshua Tenenbaum received a BS (1993) from Yale University and a PhD (1999) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He taught at Stanford University beginning in 1999 before returning to MIT in 2002. Tenenbaum currently serves as a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, as a principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), and as a research leader in MIT’s Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines. His articles have been published in Science, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Psychological Review, PNAS, and Behavioral and Brain Sciences, among other journals.
Josh was one of the co-organizers of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) for the Research Interfaces between Brain Science and Computer Science (BRAIN) workshop. This two-day workshop, brought together brain researchers and computer scientists for a scientific dialogue aimed at exposing new opportunities for joint research in the many exciting facets, established and new, of the interface between the two fields. Videos of the workshop presentations, as well as the presentation slides, are posted on the workshop website in the agenda. See the workshop report here.
Learn more about why the MacArthur Foundation chose this accomplished computer scientists and read about all the remarkable MacArthur Fellows here!
