Stephen Grossberg (born December 31, 1939) is a cognitive scientist, theoretical and computational psychologist, neuroscientist, mathematician, biomedical engineer, and neuromorphic technologist. He is the Wang Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and a professor emeritus of Mathematics & Statistics, Psychological & Brain Sciences, and Biomedical Engineering at Boston University.
Career
Early life and education Grossberg first lived in Woodside, Queens, in New York City. His father died from Hodgkin's lymphoma when he was one year old. His mother remarried when he was five years old. He then moved with his mother, stepfather, and older brother, Mitchell, to Jackson Heights, Queens. He attended Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan after passing its competitive entrance exam. He graduated first in his class from Stuyvesant in 1957. He began undergraduate studies at Dartmouth College in 1957, where he first conceived of the paradigm of using nonlinear differential equations to describe neural networks that model brain dynamics, as well as the basic equations that many scientists use for this purpose today. He then continued to study both psychology and neuroscience. He received a B.A. in 1961 from Dartmouth as its first joint major in mathematics and psychology. Grossberg then went to Stanford University, from which he graduated in 1964 with an MS in mathematics and transferred to The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now The Rockefeller University) in Manhattan. In his first year at Rockefeller, he wrote a 500-page monograph summarizing his discoveries to that time. It is called The Theory of Embedding Fields with Applications to Psychology and Neurophysiology. Grossberg received a PhD in mathematics from Rockefeller in 1967 for a thesis that proved the first global content addressable memory theorems about the neural learning models that he had discovered at Dartmouth. His PhD thesis advisor was Gian-Carlo Rota.
Entering academia Grossberg was hired in 1967 as an assistant professor of applied mathematics at MIT following strong recommendations from Mark Kac and Rota. In 1969, Grossberg was promoted to associate professor after publishing a stream of conceptual and mathematical results about many aspects of neural networks, including a series of foundational articles in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences between 1967 and 1971. Grossberg was hired as a full professor at Boston University in 1975, where he is still on the faculty today. While at Boston University, he founded the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems, several interdisciplinary research centers, and various international institutions.
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