John Assad received his undergraduate degree from the State University of New York and his PhD in Neurobiology from Harvard University.
For his PhD, he investigated biophysical mechanisms of mechano-electric sensory transduction in vestibular hair cells.
He did his postdoctoral training in electrophysiology with John Maunsell, first at the University of Rochester and then at Baylor College of Medicine, where he studied mechanisms of visual perception. He joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School in 1996 and was promoted to full professor at Harvard in 2007.
John Assad’s laboratory is interested in understanding the neuronal circuitry that underlies sensory processing and control of movement in the primate brain. In particular, his lab has focused on the parietal cortex, a part of the brain where visual information from our external world is converted into a form that is useful for guiding behavior.
His lab has also studied the role of the basal ganglia in movement control, an issue that is important for understanding movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.
His work has been published in major international journals, including Nature, Nature Neuroscience, and Neuron.
John Assad’s laboratory is interested in understanding the neuronal circuitry that underlies sensory processing and control of movement in the primate brain. In particular, his lab has focused on the parietal cortex, a part of the brain where visual information from our external world is converted into a form that is useful for guiding behavior.
His lab has also studied the role of the basal ganglia in movement control, an issue that is important for understanding movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.
His work has been published in major international journals, including Nature, Nature Neuroscience, and Neuron.
He is also a former fellow of the Klingenstein and McKnight Foundations.
In 2008 he became the director of IIT’s Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems.
