Konrad Kording Appointed Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor

President Amy Gutmann and Provost Vincent Price are pleased to announce the appointment of Konrad Kording as the Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor, effective July 1, 2017. Kording, a pioneer of computational neuroscience, will hold joint appointments in the Department of Neuroscience in the Perelman School of Medicine and 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,” said Penn President Amy Gutmann. “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 Kording’s 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 Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Northwestern University and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, Kording earned a PhD in Physics (2001) from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, followed by postdoctoral appointments at the Collegium Helveticum in Zurich and at University College London and as a Heisenberg Fellow at MIT.

“Konrad Kording,” said Provost Price, “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 President 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.