Meet the Scientist Index Terrence J. Sejnowski Explore and Discover with Terrence J. Sejnowski: How Do We Predict the Future: Brains, Rewards and Addiction Biography Terrence J. Sejnowski is a professor in the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute, and in the Division of Biological Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. His goal is to discover the principles that link brain mechanisms and behavior. To do this, his laboratory uses experiments and computational neuroscience, which is a relatively new approach to understanding how the nervous system represents, processes, stores, and acts upon information in the environment. Sejnowski's research explores the chemical communication between individual nerve cells, as well as the patterns of activity of large populations of nerve cells. Processes of interest include how the brain organizes sensory information and how memories are consolidated during sleep. The work of Sejnowski and his colleagues has shown that some brain systems in humans, such as those that play a role in drug addiction, originate from brain systems so evolutionarily ancient that even insects have them. Photo Credit: Mark Harmel, Howard Hughes Medical Institute