Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US

Tomaso A. Poggio, is the Eugene McDermott Professor at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; Co- Director, Center for Biological and Computational Learning; Member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT; since 2000, member of the faculty of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Born in Genoa, Italy in 1947 (and naturalized in 1994), he received his Doctor in Theoretical Physics from the University of Genoa in 1971 and was a Wissenschaftlicher Assistant, Max Planck Institut für Biologische Kybernetik, Tüebingen, Germany from 1972 until 1981 when he became Associate Professor at MIT. He is an honorary member of the Neuroscience Research Program, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Founding Fellow of AAAI. He received several awards such as the Otto-Hahn-Medaille Award of the Max-Planck-Society, the Max Planck Research Award (with M. Fahle), from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the MIT 50K Entrepreneurship Competition Award, the Laurea Honoris Causa from the University of Pavia in 2000 (Volta Bicentennial), the 2003 Gabor Award, the 2009 Okawa prize and 2009 Okawa prize and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellowship (2009). He is one of the most cited computational neuroscientists (with a h-index greater than 90 – based on GoogleScholar). He is somewhat unique in having a significant impact in most areas of sciences, with for instance a h-index = 35 in social sciences and around 20 in business (as remarked in the Via-academy list with the note ‘most eclectic scientist’).