The Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience is a campus research group comprising students, postdocs and faculty who are working on theories of computation in the brain. We are one of several research centers within the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. The Redwood Center was established at Berkeley in July 2005 after originating as the non-profit Redwood Neuroscience Institute, founded by Jeff Hawkins. You can read more about the history of RNI here. Our Research page describes some of the things we are currently working on.

The objective of our research is to develop mathematical and computational models of the underlying neurobiological mechanisms involved in perception, cognition, learning, and motor function. We train students at UC Berkeley in these ideas and methods, and we collaborate with experimental neuroscience labs in order to test theories, design of experiments, and analyze neural data. The resulting products, from basic research findings to software tools, are made accessible to the public, in the Berkeley tradition of open publication and open-source software.

Members of the Redwood Center come from a diverse set of academic backgrounds including neuroscience, vision science, psychology, physics, electrical engineering, computer science, and mathematics. We seek to bring ideas from these different fields together in order to develop and test theories of neural computation in the brain.

The Redwood Center hosts seminars, courses and journal clubs throughout the year. Our seminars feature research spanning a wide variety of topics related to neuroscience and computation. We also hosted the CRCNS summer courses on mining and modeling of neuroscience data, which you can learn more about here.