BSC Member - David Redish, Ph.D.

David Redish, Ph.D., is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. He is the co-director of the NeuroPRSMH center there. Dr. Redish’s research spans the neurophysiology of behavior, including computational, experimental, theoretical, and clinical approaches. His laboratory has major research efforts in theoretical explanations of the interactions of multiple decision-making systems, in the neurophysiology of the information processing in those decision-making systems, in the clinical consequences of dysfunction in those decision-making systems, and in how those decision-making systems interact to change the efficacy of sociological codes. He has worked in the fields of computational neuroscience, spatial navigation, computational psychiatry, and neuroeconomics. He has contributed to meta-science questions and the philosophy of scientific endeavors. His laboratory’s experimental approaches include large neural ensemble recording from awake, behaving rats, and the development of new mathematical techniques to analyze those ensembles. His theoretical approaches include integrative analyses, as well as building computational models at all levels from detailed, cellular compartmental models, to highly abstract models of behavior. Dr. Redish earned his B.A. degree from Johns Hopkins in computer science and creative writing and his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon in computer science. He then did postdoctoral work in neuroscience at the University of Arizona. He has been on the faculty of the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota since 2000. He is the author of over a hundred papers and three books, including Beyond the Cognitive Map: From place cells to episodic memory (MIT Press 1999) and The Mind within the Brain: How we make decisions and how those decisions go wrong (Oxford Univ Press 2013). His most recent book is Changing How We Choose: The new science of morality (MIT Press 2022). He also co-edited the book Computational Psychiatry: New Perspectives on Mental Illness with Joshua Gordon which appeared in 2016.