Richard Andersen is the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He received a B.S. from the University of California, Davis in 1973 and a Ph.D. in physiology from the University of California, San Francisco in 1979, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship with Vernon Mountcastle at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Prior to joining Caltech in 1993, Andersen served as assistant and associate professor at the Salk Institute and as associate and full professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. At Caltech, he holds the T&C Chen Brain-Machine Interface Center Leadership Chair and directs both the T&C Chen Brain-Machine Interface Center and the Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology. He also serves as vice-chair of the Institutional Review Board and a member of the Internal Animal Care and Use Committee.

Andersen's research explores the neurobiological basis of sensory processing in sight, hearing, balance, and touch, along with neural mechanisms of action planning, decision-making, and neural prosthetics, with a focus on the posterior parietal cortex as a bridge from sensation to action. His lab has developed cognitive brain-machine interfaces using intention signals from this cortical area to allow paralyzed individuals to control prosthetic limbs and external devices, advancing from animal studies to human clinical trials including the first posterior parietal cortex implant in 2013. He has trained 60 postdoctoral and doctoral students, 35 of whom hold tenure-track faculty positions worldwide, and has published approximately 140 technical articles while editing two books. Notable publications include "Multimodal representation of space in the posterior parietal cortex and its use in planning movements" (Annual Review of Neuroscience, 1997), "Encoding of spatial location by posterior parietal neurons" (Science, 1985), "Intentional maps in posterior parietal cortex" (Annual Review of Neuroscience, 2002), "Coding of intention in the posterior parietal cortex" (Nature, 1997), and "A back-propagation programmed network that simulates response properties of a subset of posterior parietal neurons" (Nature, 1988). His achievements have been recognized with the McKnight Foundation Scholars Award, Sloan Foundation Fellowship, Spencer Award from Columbia University, McKnight Technical Innovation in Neuroscience Award, McKnight Neuroscience Brain Disorders Award, and the 2024 International Prize for Translational Neuroscience from the Gertrud Reemtsma Foundation.

Professional Email: andersen@vis.caltech.edu