Barbara Oakley, PhD, PE is a Professor of Engineering at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan and Coursera’s inaugural “Innovation Instructor.” Her work focuses on the complex relationship between neuroscience and social behaviour. Dr. Oakley’s research has been described as “revolutionary” in the Wall Street Journal—she has published in outlets as varied as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. She has won numerous national teaching awards, including the American Society of Engineering Education’s Chester F. Carlson Award for technical innovation in engineering education.

Terrence Sejnowski is a pioneer in computational neuroscience and his goal is to understand the principles that link brain to behaviour. His laboratory uses both experimental and modeling techniques to study the biophysical properties of synapses and neurons and the population dynamics of large networks of neurons. New computational models and new analytical tools have been developed to understand how the brain represents the world and how new representations are formed through learning algorithms for changing the synaptic strengths of connections between neurons. He has published over 500 scientific papers and 12 books, including The Computational Brain, with Patricia Churchland