Rate My Professor Richard Andersen

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.