Reza Shadmehr is a professor of biomedical engineering at the Whiting School of Engineering and neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Shadmehr also serves as co-director of the biomedical engineering department’s Ph.D. program, and as the director of the Laboratory for Computational Motor Control.
His research focuses on understanding how the human brain perceives the world, how it learns, and how it controls our movements. The Shadmehr Lab approaches these questions by stressing a close integration of viewpoints from robotics and control theory with neuroscience. They try to understand the nature of the biological computations that underlie the control of movements, using brain imaging studies and the study of motor disorders in patient populations.
He has many published works including two books, The Computational Neurobiology of Reaching and Pointing and Biological Learning and Control. Shadmehr also has two patents filed.
Shadmehr received his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Gonzaga University. He earned a master’s degree in biomedical engineering and a Ph.D. in computer science (robotics) from the University of Southern California. He completed the McDonnell-Pew post-doctoral fellowship at MIT and joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1995.