Professional Bio

Dr. Ned T. Sahin completed his PhD at Harvard in cognitive neuroscience in 2007, and was awarded the Richard J. Herrnstein prize for the year’s best PhD dissertation at Harvard. He completed a post-doctoral fellowship at UC San Diego in 2009, then received an NIH training grant to be a joint Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Salk Institute and UC San Diego. Some of his research into the biological basis of language was recently published as a report in Science magazine, with an accompanying “Perspectives” piece and some popular-press coverage. Dr. Sahin is now directing a research center and neurotechnology “product estuary” focused on Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) for cognition, in a novel collaborative model with traditional academia and industry.

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.