William Thomas Newsome, III, is professor and chair of neurobiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. His research has focused on identifying the neural mechanisms underling visual perception, in particular deep questions involving visually-based decision making and the internal representation within the brain of the likely value of given actions. He has demonstrated that by stimulating a region of the midbrain (superior colliculus) of primates with microelectrodes, he could cause predicable changes in performance not simply a correlation between neural activity and behavior. His work is contributing to the mapping of cognitive functions of different brain structures and our understanding of normal physiology and cognitive processing. Dr. Newsome, a summa cum laude graduate of Stetson University in Deland, Florida, received his Ph.D. in biology from the California Institute of Technology. After a year of postdoctoral research at Caltech, he moved on to the National Eye Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, where he spent four years as a research fellow. He joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Stony Brook as an assistant professor of neurobiology and behavior in 1984 and, four years later, came to Stanford’s School of Medicine as an associate professor. Named a full professor in 1999, he became chair of the neurobiology department in 2005. Dr. Newsome has also been an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for the past decade. He was formerly a McDonnell Pew Visiting Fellow at Oxford, where he was senior visiting research fellow at St. John’s College, and has been the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, his numerous other honors include the Rank Prize in Optoelectronics, the W. Alden Spenser Award for highly original contributions to research in neurobiology given by the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, two Kaiser Awards for excellence in teaching given by Stanford medical students, and the Dan David Prize. Dr. Newsome currently serves on the editorial boards of the Annual Review of Neuroscience and Current Opinion in Neurobiology. He is the co-author of more than sixty-five papers published in scientific journals and a dozen essays in volumes of collected works.