Carver Mead

Mead has taught at Caltech for roughly six decades and is one of the fathers of modern computing. He significantly advanced the technology of integrated circuits by developing a method called very-large-scale integration (VSLI) that allows engineers to combine thousands of transistors onto a single microchip, thus exponentially expanding computer processing power. This technology has been applied to computational neuroscience in machine learning and machine vision. It was due to his discoveries that the world's first graduate program in Computation and Neural Systems (CNS) was established at Caltech in 1986; the CNS program continues to flourish to this day. To learn more about Mead's research visit here.