SFI External Professor John Krakauer was named director of the Centre for Restorative Neurotechnology (CRN) at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon — a center he helped create — last year. Krakauer has been connected to Champalimaud for more than a decade, first as a visiting scientist at its Centre for the Unknown.
He takes on the new role while continuing at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he is the John C. Malone Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and directs the Brain, Learning, Animation, and Movement Lab.
His research spans motor control and learning, the prediction of and recovery from strokes, and the design of new neuro-rehabilitation approaches. Much of that work is aimed at treatment, not just understanding: he has co-founded efforts to turn studies of human movement into therapies, including motion-controlled games used in stroke rehabilitation. The CRN extends that line of work, aiming to bring together neuroscience, technology, and medicine to turn research into treatments for neurological and psychiatric conditions.
Krakauer first came to the Santa Fe Institute in the early 2000s and has been a member of its external faculty since 2019. Recently, he and SFI Resident Professor Melanie Mitchell co-organized a working group on the nature of intelligence, bringing together scholars from neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and AI to examine the notion of "intelligence" in both biological systems and machines.