Richard Andersen, the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience at Caltech, studies neural mechanisms of sight, hearing, balance, touch, and action, and the development of neural prosthetics. Andersen obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins Medical School. He was a faculty member of the Salk Institute and MIT before coming to Caltech.  Among his discoveries was finding neural signals of intention, proving that they are not sensory in nature but rather reflect the planning of the subject.  He has recently applied this discovery of intention to advance research on brain-machine interfaces.  He and his group have shown that paralyzed patients’ intents can be decoded from brain activity to control assistive devices such as robotic limbs.  Andersen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is recipient of a McKnight Foundation Scholars Award, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, Visiting Professor at the College de France, and the Spencer Award from Columbia University. He has served as Director of the McDonnell/Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, and is currently Director of the T & C Chen Brain-machine Interface Center at Caltech and Director of the Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology at Caltech.  He has also been a member or chair of various government and university advisory committees.