Jesse Goldberg

Jesse Goldberg received his B.S. from Haverford College and his M.D./Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University. His Ph.D. with Rafa Yuste focused on dendritic computation and microcircuits of the cerebral cortex. In medical school, Dr. Goldberg became interested in disorders such as Parkinson’s and dystonia that impair basal ganglia-dependent reinforcement learning (RL). His postdoctoral work at MIT focused on how the basal ganglia implement RL in juvenile songbirds. 

Dr. Goldberg has been supported by the Pew, Klingenstein, and Kavli Foundations, as well as the NIH New Innovator and Cornell Neurotech programs. His guiding philosophy is that comparative approaches (across species and across the animal-machine divide) are necessary to distinguish general principles from behavior-, effector-, machine-, and species-specific solutions to motor learning problems.