Liam Paninski: Neural Code Breaker

Credit: © 2007 Greg Kessler Photography" /> Credit: © 2007 Greg Kessler Photography The lone distraction in Liam Paninski's austere New York City office is an acoustic guitar lying strings up on his desk. A computer idles beside the instrument, and empty bookshelves line the room that the soft-spoken Columbia University professor of theoretical neuroscience jokingly calls his "lab." Paninski's decor parallels his approach to neuroscience. The statistical

Written byBob Grant

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The lone distraction in Liam Paninski's austere New York City office is an acoustic guitar lying strings up on his desk. A computer idles beside the instrument, and empty bookshelves line the room that the soft-spoken Columbia University professor of theoretical neuroscience jokingly calls his "lab."

Paninski's decor parallels his approach to neuroscience. The statistical models and computational analyses he's been developing are meant to clarify the voluminous clutter of data pouring in from increasingly sophisticated recording equipment. He's been working to streamline the cacophony.

"This is really becoming a huge problem in neuroscience," says Paninski. "There are lots of [labs] where people have collected gobs of data, and we really need to develop tools that can handle that." Developing these tools has been Paninski's single-minded focus, fostered since he was an undergraduate in John Donoghue's lab at Brown University.

Nicholas Hatsopoulos, a postdoc in Donoghue's lab and Paninski's mentor, ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
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From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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