Dr. Kwabena Boahen

Biography

Kwabena Boahen is a Professor in the Departments of Bioengineering and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He holds a courtesy appointment in Computer Science and is an investigator at the Bio-X Institute and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. He founded the Brains Silicon Lab at Stanford, focusing on neuronal biophysics, cognitive behavior, and computational modeling to emulate brain functions using silicon chips in the field of neuromorphic engineering. Boahen's research interest centers around neural networks, which led him to develop technologies that leverage these systems. Born in Ghana, he pursued his undergraduate studies in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, from which he graduated in 1985. He earned his PhD in Computation and Neural Systems from the California Institute of Technology in 1997. Prior to his current role, he served on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the inaugural holder of the Skirkanich Term Junior Chair. His significant contributions to the field are evidenced by his hundreds of publications and features in prestigious journals such as Scientific American. Boahen has also delivered numerous seminars, including a TED talk in 2007 that garnered over seven hundred thousand views. He has received several notable awards, including the Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering and the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, and was elected as a fellow of both the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the IEEE, recognizing his lab’s innovative work on the Neurogrid, a compact emulation of the cerebral cortex. He led pioneering research efforts on neuromorphic chips through the Brainstorm Project and was instrumental in establishing the commercial entity Femtosense Inc. in 2018.

Research Interests