Torsten Wiesel
Torsten Nils Wiesel ( born June 3, 1924 in Uppsala ) is a Swedish- American neurophysiologist.
Wiesel Institute in Stockholm in 1954 at the Karolinska his doctorate in medicine. Then he went to the USA where he was at Johns Hopkins University from 1955, from 1958 as Assistant Professor of Physiological ophthalmology. From 1960 he was assistant professor, in 1967 professor of physiology ( and from 1968 for Neurobiology ) in the Department of Psychiatry and since 1974 he was Robert Winthrop Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. 1973 to 1984 he was Director ( Chairman ) of the Department of Psychiatry. From 1978 to 1979 he was president of the Society for Neuroscience. From 1983, he was Vincent Brooke Astor Professor at the Laboratory of Neurobiology The Rockefeller University, whose laboratory of Neurobiology, he led and which he was president from 1991 to 1998.
Hubel and Wiesel studied since the 1960s in detail the construction and information processing of the visual cortex using the example of cats and monkeys, which became the best-known part of the brain through their investigations.
1978 Wiesel was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize -. For his work with David H. Hubel of the processing of visual information were Hubel and he won in 1981 with one half of the Nobel Prize for Medicine. The other half went to Roger Sperry. 1991 Wiesel was awarded the Neuronal Plasticity Prize and he received many other awards such as the Ralph W. Gerard Prize ( 1993), the Karl Spencer Lashley price Dickson price, the Rosenstiel Award, the Friedenwald Award ( 1975) and the Jules Stein Award ( 1971). In 2005 he received the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor in the USA. He is a multiple honorary doctorates.
He holds U.S. citizenship. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and its Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Swedish Physiological Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.