Richard Andersen, the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience at Caltech, studies neural mechanisms of sight, hearing, balance, touch, and action, and the development of neural prosthetics. Andersen obtained a Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins Medical School. He was a faculty member of the Salk Institute and MIT before coming to Caltech. Andersen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is recipient of a McKnight Foundation Scholars Award, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, Visiting Professor at the College de France, and the Spencer Award from Columbia University. He has served as Director of the McDonnell/Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, and the Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology at Caltech, as well as being a member or chair of various government advisory committees.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)



On January 18, 2013, Caltech hosted TEDxCaltech: The Brain, a forward-looking celebration of humankind's quest to understand the brain, by exploring the past, present and future of neuroscience. Visit TEDxCaltech.com for more details.