By Liz Fuller-Wright, Office of Communications
Sebastian Seung has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He is one of eight Princeton faculty members chosen this year, the largest number of new academy members from Princeton University in at least a century.
Seung, the Anthony B. Evnin ’62 Professor in Neuroscience and professor of computer science, is among the 120 new members and 25 international members recognized for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research, according to the academy’s announcement.
Membership in the academy is one of the highest honors given to a scientist or engineer in the United States. Established in 1863, the academy now has 2,705 active members and 557 international members, who are nonvoting members with citizenship outside the United States.
A pioneering neuroscientist and computer scientist, Seung has been called a cartographer of the brain. He spent more than a decade building the tools to map the branches and connections between neurons in the brain. He and his collaborators have completed maps of an entire fruit fly brain and a cubic millimeter of mouse brain. Using these hyper-precise wiring diagrams, his team is making rapid strides into understanding and predicting brain function and development.
His book “Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are,” published in 2012, been translated into more than 25 languages. His work as been recognized by a Pradel Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences and the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences. Before joining Princeton in 2014 he was a professor at MIT. He has also worked at Bell Labs and Samsung Research. He holds a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.