Daniel Wolpert

Biography

Daniel Wolpert is professor of neuroscience and vice-chair of the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University's Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. His research takes computational and experimental approaches to human movement, asking how the brain learns, plans and controls action under uncertainty. Trained in medical sciences at the University of Cambridge and clinical medicine at Oxford, he held faculty positions at University College London and the University of Cambridge — where he was the Royal Society Noreen Murray Research Professor — before moving to Columbia in 2018. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences, and has received the Royal Society's Francis Crick Prize Lecture and Ferrier Medal.

Research Interests

• motor control
• Bayesian inference
• sensorimotor learning
• computational neuroscience
• decision making

SCENE Teams

Human Team

Featured Publications

• The Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience: Studying how the brain interacts with the world

  Angelaki DE, Batista A, Fitzgerald T, Kominsky JF, Lengyel M, Mathis A, Mathis MW, Moss CF, Niell CM, Noel JP, Pitkow X, Rothkopf CA, Savin C, Stachenfeld K, Suthana N, Tolias A, Ulanovsky N, Wolpert DM, Wong A, Zimmermann J

  Neuron, 2026 · DOI (opens in new tab) · Preprint (PDF) (opens in new tab)

• Curriculum effects in multitask learning through the lens of contextual inference

  Shivkumar S, Lengyel M, Wolpert DM

  Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 2025 · DOI (opens in new tab)