Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute
A computational neuroscientist who co-invented the Boltzmann machine with Geoffrey Hinton and leads the Salk Institute's computational neurobiology lab.
Terrence Sejnowski is the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, and a professor at UC San Diego. Born in Cleveland in 1947, he earned a BS in physics from Case Western Reserve University, then an MA and a PhD in physics at Princeton, where John Hopfield advised his doctorate in 1978.
He has performed research in neural networks and computational neuroscience and co-invented the Boltzmann machine with Geoffrey Hinton. He founded the journal Neural Computation and is president of the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation, which runs the NeurIPS conference. With Barbara Oakley he co-created Learning How To Learn, the world's most popular online course, on Coursera. He was an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1991 to 2018 and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2025.
With Geoffrey Hinton, co-invented the Boltzmann machine, a foundational stochastic neural network model.
Founded the journal Neural Computation and serves as president of the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation, which runs the NeurIPS conference.
With Barbara Oakley, co-created and taught the Coursera course Learning How To Learn, described as the world's most popular online course.