Emeritus Faculty
Vincent and Brooke Astor Professor Emeritus and President Emeritus
wiesel@rockefeller.edu
Laboratory of Neurobiology
Since retiring as president of Rockefeller University in 1998, Dr. Wiesel has turned his attention to international science advocacy. In 2000, Dr. Wiesel became secretary general of the Human Frontier Science Program, established to support international, innovative and interdisciplinary basic research in the life sciences. He was chairman of the Board of Governors of the New York Academy of Sciences from 2000 to 2006. Dr. Wiesel has long served as chair of the scientific advisory committee of the Pew Scholars Program. He also helped initiate its Latin American Fellows Program in the Biomedical Sciences, which provides support for Latin American researchers for postdoctoral training in the United States. He is a founding member of the Israeli-Palestinian Science Organization, a nonprofit alliance established in 2004 to support collaborative research between scientists in Israel and Palestine to promote positive interactions between the two communities. Dr. Wiesel currently serves on the scientific advisory boards of research institutes in Japan, China, India, Brazil and Italy.
In 1981, Dr. Wiesel shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with David Hubel for studies of how visual information is transmitted to and processed in the visual cortex of the brain. Cats and monkeys were subjects in these investigations that identified specialized functions of individual cells in the brain’s visual cortex and mapped the functional architecture of cells in the visual cortex. Drs. Hubel and Wiesel also studied the development of the visual cortex and the role of innate and experiential factors. This research has had important clinical implications, including a more effective treatment of congenital cataracts. Dr. Wiesel is also a recipient of the 2005 National Medal of Science.
Born in 1924 in Uppsala, Sweden, Dr. Wiesel received his medical degree from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm in 1954, after which he taught in the Institute’s department of physiology and worked in the child psychiatry unit of the Karolinska Hospital. He began a fellowship in ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins University Medical School in 1955 and became an assistant professor there in 1958. The following year he became an instructor in pharmacology at Harvard Medical School, beginning a 24-year career with the university; he became professor in the new department of neurobiology in 1968 and its chair in 1971.
Dr. Wiesel came to Rockefeller in 1983 as Vincent and Brooke Astor Professor and head of
the Laboratory of Neurobiology. He was president of Rockefeller from 1991 to 1998. During his
term he was instrumental in the recruitment of 16 new faculty members, the establishment of six
interdisciplinary research centers and the formation of the collaborative relationship between the
Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, of which he was chairman, and Rockefeller University.
Dr. Wiesel has also done much work as a global human rights advocate. He is a founding
member of the International Human Rights Network of Academies and Scholarly Societies.
He served for 10 years as chair of the committee on human rights of the National Academy of
Sciences. He is currently on the board of the Hospital for Special Surgery, the Pew Charitable
Trust’s global environmental committee and on the Population Council. In addition, Dr. Wiesel
serves on the scientific review committees of the Merck and Steinbach Foundations.
