Sheila Nirenberg

Why you should listen

Sheila Nirenberg is a neuroscientist/professor at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, where she studies neural coding – that is, how the brain takes information from the outside world and encodes it in patterns of electrical activity. The idea is to be able to decode the activity, to look at a pattern of electrical pulses and know what an animal is seeing or thinking or feeling.  Recently, she’s been using this work to develop new kinds of prosthetic devices, particularly ones for treating blindness.