Professor Bruno A. Olshausen is affiliated with the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the School of Optometry at the University of California, Berkeley. He also serves as the Director of the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience , focusing on computational models of sensory coding and visual perception. Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems (Caltech, 1994) M.S. and B.S. in Electrical Engineering (Stanford, 1987 and 1986) His research investigates how the brain processes sensory information by developing probabilistic models of natural images and neural circuits. Key contributions include sparse coding models that replicate receptive field properties of the primary visual cortex (V1), and work on extending these models to learn invariances and hierarchical structures. He has also collaborated with electrical engineers to design low-power analog memory systems inspired by brain computation, and developed software tools like SPARSENET and SPARSEPYR for neural signal processing. His work spans computational neuroscience, theoretical modeling, and interdisciplinary applications in vision science. As an educator, he has co-instructed courses such as Vision Science 206D (Neuroanatomy of the visual system) and Vision Science 212B (Visual neurophysiology), and independently taught Vision Science 265: Neural Computation at Berkeley and Psychology 290 at UC Davis. He co-edited the book Probabilistic Models of the Brain: Perception and Neural Function (MIT Press, 2002) and organized workshops at institutions like the Gordon Research Conference and Nature Neuroscience .
