Andrew D. Huberman

Starting in 2019, Dr. Huberman initiated a series of short, daily Neuroscience Education posts to Instagram, in order to share exciting discoveries in the field as they relate to human health, development, and disease.

In May, 2018, the Huberman Laboratory published an Article in the journal Nature reporting their discovery of two new mammalian brain circuits: one that promotes fear and paralysis, and another that promotes “courageous”/confrontational reaction, to visually-evoked threats. That discovery prompted the now ongoing exploration of how these brain regions may be involved in humans suffering from anxiety-related disorders such as phobias and generalized anxiety.

In 2017, the Huberman Lab created a state-of-the-art virtual reality platform for probing the neural mechanisms underlying pathologic fear and anxiety. That work involved collecting 360-degree video of common fear inducing scenarios such as heights and claustrophobia as well as atypical fear inducing situations such as swimming with Great White Sharks. The Huberman VR platform is aimed at making discoveries that hopefully will lead to developing new tools for humans to adjust their state in order to promote adaptive coping with stress.

After moving to Stanford in 2016, Huberman discovered and published the use of non-invasive methods such as visual stimulation can enhance regeneration of damaged retinal neurons, leading to partial recovery from blindness, especially when the stimulation is paired with specific forms of gene therapy. The work was covered extensively in the popular press, including TIME Magazine and Scientific American and is part of the National Eye Institute’s Audacious Goals Initiative to restore vision to the blind. The Huberman Lab extended those findings to develop a human clinical trial using virtual reality technology to stimulate regeneration and plasticity of damaged retinal and other visual system neurons.

Huberman was awarded the McKnight Foundation Neuroscience Scholar Award (2013), and a Biomedical Scholar Award from the Pew Charitable Trusts. He is the recipient of the 2017 ARVO Cogan Award for making major contributions to the fields of vision science and efforts to regenerate the visual system and cure blindness.

Dr. Huberman was an Assistant Professor of Neurobiology and Neuroscience at University of California, San Diego from 2011–2015, where his group pioneered the use of genetic tools for the study of the visual system function, development and disease. Among the Huberman Lab's discoveries was the finding that specific types of retinal neurons degenerate early in Glaucoma a common blinding disease that depletes sight in > 70 million people worldwide and for which there is currently no cure.

From 1998–2000, Huberman worked in the laboratory of Irving Zucker and with Marc Breedlove, at University of California, Berkeley, as part of a team that defined how early androgen exposure impacts development, and he performed the first experiments defining the structure of binocular visual pathways that set the circadian clock in the hypothalamus. From 2000-2004, working as a Ph.D. student in the laboratory of Barbara Chapman at the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, he discovered that neural activity and axon guidance molecules work in concert to ensure proper wiring of binocular maps in the brain. Huberman was a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow researcher in the laboratory of Ben A. Barres from 2005-2010.

Andrew D. Huberman (born in 1975 in Palo Alto, California) is an American neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He has made numerous important contributions to the fields of brain development, brain plasticity, and neural regeneration and repair. A large amount of that work focused on the visual system, including the mechanisms that control light-mediated activation of the circadian and autonomic arousal centers in the brain, as well as the brain control over conscious vision or sight.