David J. Heeger is a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University (NYU). He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a research scientist at the NASA’s Ames Research Center, and an associate professor at Stanford University before coming to NYU. His research spans an interdisciplinary cross-section of engineering, psychology and neuroscience, the current focus of which is to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and computational theory to quantitatively investigate the relationship between brain and behavior.

He was awarded the David Marr Prize in computer vision in 1987, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in neuroscience in 1994, the Troland Award in psychology from the National Academy of Sciences in 2002 and the Margaret and Herman Sokol Faculty Award in the Sciences from New York University in 2006.