John J. Hopfield—neuroscientist, chemist, physicist, and computer scientist—has been selected as the winner of the 1989 Wright Prize for interdisciplinary study in science and engineering from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif. Hopfield, 56, known for his research on neural networks, received $20,000 and a bronze sculpture from the college on October 12.
Hopfield currently holds a joint appointment in the departments of chemistry and biology at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he is the Roscoe 0. Dickinson Professor of Biology and Chemistry. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1958 and for 20 years taught physics, first at the University of California, Berkeley, then at Princeton University, where he was Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics. Since 1980, Hopfield has taught at Caltech, where he has conducted research on the structure and function of biomolecules, biomolecular information processing, and the relation between brains and computers.
His ...
