Professional Bio
Note: Dr. Ned T. Sahin is now running Brain Power. Please see the web site for more details!
Dr. Ned T. Sahin completed his PhD at Harvard in cognitive neuroscience, and was awarded the Richard J. Herrnstein prize for the year’s best PhD dissertation at Harvard. He then completed a post-doctoral fellowship at UC San Diego Medical School, then received an NIH training grant to be a Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Salk Institute and the Institute for Neural Computation. Some of his research into the biological basis of language was published as a report in Science magazine, with an accompanying “Perspectives” piece and much popular-press coverage. Dr. Sahin is now directing an academically-flavored neurotechnology company focused on transforming consumer-targeted wearables like Google Glass into neuroassistive devices.
Sahin did his undergraduate work at Williams College, in biology and neuroscience, studied for a year at Oxford, and did a Master’s at MIT in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department. During grad school, he maintained a collaboration and physical presence at the Massachusetts General Hospital in the Martinos Biomedical Imaging Center. There, he learned to do fMRI and ICE research, applied these methods to studies of human language, and also wrote software to automate the analysis and display of fMRI and ICE data. He was appointed to be the student member at the MGH faculty meetings for part of this time, and was appointed to an institutional training grant (in brain imaging) that linked MGH and Harvard Psychology. While post-doctoral fellow at the University of California San Diego & Salk Institute, he was also an adjunct post-doc at Harvard.
Dr. Sahin has presented his research in ten countries, at many universities and conferences. He recently chaired a symposium session on applying ICE research to human cognition, at the annual meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping in Barcelona.
During grad school, he was Principle Investigator on an SBIR grant project (Phase I and II) at a technology company. The project combined several neurological and physiological methods toward a wearable sensor system to predict and avert cognitive overload in high-stress workers such as pilots, soldiers, and surgeons.
Dr. Sahin has won several teaching prizes (undergraduate and graduate level), and in the first year at Harvard served as the head teaching fellow for a new 300-student course in the Core Curriculum, overseeing 10 teaching fellows. Sahin’s graduate supervisor was Steven Pinker, PhD, his primary post-doc supervisor and long-time mentor is Eric Halgren, PhD, and his secondary supervisor was Terry Sejnowski, PhD. For mental diversion, Ned enjoys writing poetry, photography, world travel, rock climbing, and rowing.
Update: At the end of 2013, Dr. Sahin founded an academically-flavored company called Brain Power, to turn some neuroscience innovations into tangible products that can benefit many people in their daily lives. Specifically, he chose to address the challenges of autism, and to apply the newest in brain science from MIT and Harvard in the context of the newest in wearable technologies, Google Glass. His group is research-focused yet practically minded and includes many students from both universities. The project has been featured in TechCrunch, on CBS TV, by Autism Speaks, and many other outlets; and has been praised by Google
Some recent images:
(These are full-size images. Do a “save image as…” if you happen to want the high-resolution image.)