Mark S. Cohen

Personal Statement:  

As a curiosity-driven scientist, with an engineer’s mindset, I believe that the universe operates on orderly physical principles, knowledge of which will allow us to investigate and understand the most profound and difficult questions: The nature of our inner experience, the meaning of our existence, and the large-scale organization of society.

Immersing myself in my curiosity has generally served me. Understanding and modifying my motorcycle is as rewarding and riding it. I’m as captivated, and invested, in the physiology of perception as I am in the beauty of musical polyrhythms, and the technical skills that I’ve gained have made me into an effective problem solver; when there is something that I want to learn, from theory of diminished musical scales to designing printed circuit boards, from super-conducting quantum interference detectors to sourdough bread, from architecture to organization management, from expository writing to understanding the physical substructure of the human mind, I enter into new challenges confident that with perseverance problems can be solved, often by organizing others to work with me on these quests.

People are intensely interesting to me. I love learning about their passions, their challenges, and their stories, and I love working with others to satisfy their own curiosities. The experiences through which people come to their beliefs, even when they are wildly different from my own, often explain more than the beliefs themselves.

It's my great fortune that I’ve been able to explore multiple passions as both a professional and a committed amateur. From as far back as I can remember, I had my feet planted in multiple, disparate, disciplines in arts, music, science, technology, and philosophy, without it ever occurring to me that this was unusual or problematic in any way. Through sheer luck, I’ve managed to avoid any requirement to “choose one.” As an undergraduate student at Stanford and at MIT, I moved fluidly between majors in music, architecture, mechanical and electrical engineering, and ultimately in Human Biology. The trajectory even then was less linear than it sounds, as it was punctuated by time spent performing and recording as a musician. I still remain a performing musician and visual artist.

Among the most important works in my career was the co-invention of functional MRI, which remains unique in offering the best possible window in the abstract barrier that separates the seemingly incommensurate worlds of brain and mind. Through my comfort with physics, math, electronics and computation, I’ve been able to make real contributions, developing, and using, tools that not only show us how our brains manage complex information and cognitive tasks, but which also can be run in reverse to allow us to infer inner, mental, activity from measured signals.

Educational Background:  

Post Graduate 1980-1985 The Rockefeller University
New York, NY
Neurobiology and Behavior   1974-1980 Stanford University
Human Biology  

Undergraduate  1974-1980 Stanford University
Human Biology   1976-1978 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Electrical and Mechanical Engineering