The National Academies Keck Futures Initiative (NAKFI) is pleased to announce that National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine member Dr. Michael S. Gazzaniga has accepted the appointment as chair of the NAKFI Steering Committee on The Informed Brain in a Digital World. Dr. Gazzaniga will work with the committee to plan the 2012 Conference on The Informed Brain in a Digital World, and to award $1 million in Futures Grants – on a competitive basis – to conference attendees.

 

Dr. Gazzaniga is a Professor of Psychology and the Director for the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California Santa Barbara.  He oversees an extensive and broad research program investigating how the brain enables the mind.  Over the course of several decades, a major focus of his research has been an extensive study of patients that have undergone split-brain surgery that have revealed lateralization of functions across the cerebral hemispheres.

 

In addition to his position in Santa Barbara, Professor Gazzaniga was the Director of the Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience for 19 years, President of the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute, and is the founding Director of the MacArthur Law and Neuroscience Project (2007-2011).

 

Additional information about the 2012 NAKFI Conference on The Informed Brain in a Digital World – including a list of the steering committee – is available at http://www.keckfutures.org/conferences/informed-brain.html.