David Freedman, PhD, has been named as the Chair of the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Chicago, effective October 1, 2024.
Freedman joined the UChicago faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2008 following graduate training at MIT and Postdoctoral Fellowships at MIT and Harvard Medical School. His research is aimed at understanding the brain mechanisms of visual perception and cognition. His laboratory records and analyzes the activity of neuronal populations across multiple brain regions to understand how neural circuits mediate visual learning, recognition, and decision making. His group also employs computational modeling and machine learning approaches to understand how neural networks mediate cognitively demanding behaviors.
Freedman has received numerous honors and awards including the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship from the US Department of Defense, Fellowships from the Sloan and McKnight Foundations, a NSF CAREER award, the Outstanding Graduate Teaching and Mentorship Award from The University of Chicago and was elected in 2023 as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also an active member of the Committees on Computational Neuroscience and Neurobiology and served as Chair of the Committee on Computational Neuroscience from 2015-2021. Since 2022, he has also served as a Co-Lead of The Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI+Science Postdoctoral Fellowship Program at UChicago.
As department chair, Freedman looks forward to growing neuroscience research and expanding the neuroscience community at UChicago, building on the strong foundation established over the past decade by the Department and the Neuroscience Institute. He is particularly enthusiastic about fostering collaboration and partnerships with both basic science and clinical departments, as well as with research groups in other divisions.
Freedman succeeds S. Murray Sherman, PhD, who was the inaugural chair and has been leading the department since 2006. He helped the department grow substantially, hiring more than a dozen new faculty members during his tenure, and has been a critical force for the major growth in neuroscience at UChicago over the past two decades.
