Rajesh P.N. Rao is the CJ and Elizabeth Hwang Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical Engineering, and co-Director of the Center for Neurotechnology at the University of Washington. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholar award, an NSF CAREER award, a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research, a Sloan Faculty Fellowship, and a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. He is the author of the book Brain-Computer Interfacing (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of two volumes, Probabilistic Models of the Brain (MIT Press, 2002) and Bayesian Brain (MIT Press, 2007). His research spans the areas of computational neuroscience, AI, and brain-computer interfacing. Prof. Rao and his collaborators were the first to demonstrate direct brain control of a humanoid robot in 2007 and direct brain-to-brain communication in humans in 2013. With Prof. Adrienne Fairhall, he offered the first MOOC (massively open online course) in computational neuroscience on Coursera. Prof. Rao's other passions include classical Indian paintings and the 4000-year-old undeciphered Indus script, a topic on which he has given a TED talk.
