Konrad Kording

Konrad Kording is a Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.  Kording, a pioneer of computational neuroscience, holds joint appointments in the Department of Neuroscience in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and in the Department of Bioengineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. 

“Konrad Kording’s work perfectly exemplifies our Penn Compact vision of harnessing the tools of multiple disciplines to drive innovation and understanding with the goal of improving human life around the world,” Gutmann said. “Brain science, big data, robotic technologies: Kording’s research crosses the professions and involves the most dynamic scholarly fields and tools. It also has tremendous potential to improve the diagnosis and treatment for patients with movement disorders. The Penn community –- and our society overall –- will benefit tremendously from his path-setting teaching and scholarship.”

Kording’s groundbreaking interdisciplinary research uses data science to advance a broad range of topics that include understanding brain function, improving personalized medicine, collaborating with clinicians to diagnose diseases based on mobile phone data and even understanding the careers of professors. Across many areas of biomedical research, his group analyzes large datasets to test new models and thus get closer to an understanding of complex problems in bioengineering, neuroscience and beyond.

This innovative and influential work has been published in such leading journals as Nature, Nature Neuroscience and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and supported by major grants from the National Science Foundation and others.  Currently a professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Northwestern University and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, Kording earned a Ph.D. in physics in 2001 from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, followed by postdoctoral appointments at the Collegium Helveticum in Zurich and University College London and as a Heisenberg Fellow at MIT.

“Konrad Kording,” Price said, “will be an invaluable mentor and colleague in advancing our eminence in neuroscience. More broadly, he is a pioneer in developing innovative interdisciplinary approaches to complex problems. He will be an effective campus leader in bringing together some of our most exciting initiatives in medicine, data science and bioengineering.” 

The Penn Integrates Knowledge program was launched by Gutmann in 2005 as a University-wide initiative to recruit exceptional faculty members whose research and teaching exemplify the integration of knowledge across disciplines and who are appointed in at least two schools at Penn.

Dr. Kording's research has one single focus, data that matters. Early research in the lab focused on computational neuroscience and in particular movement. But as the approaches matured, the focus has more been on discovering ways in which new data sources as well as emerging data analysis can enable awesome possibilities. One focus is on deep learning and its neural implementation. The other current focus is on Causality in Data science applications - how do we know how things work if we cannot randomize? Our style of working is transdisciplinary, we collaborate on virtually every project.

• Data science
• Neuroscience
• Medicine, Rehabilitation
• Statistics
• Machine learning
• Science of science