Haim Sompolinsky

Haim Sompolinsky was born in 1949 in Copenhagen

Haim Sompolinsky was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, on October 14, 1949, to David and Freddie, a family from Denmark. His father, Professor David Sompolinsky, escaped the Nazis and helped smuggle Jews to Sweden during the Holocaust. He later founded the microbiology lab at Assaf Harofeh hospital.

He studied at Yeshivat HaYishuv HaHadash in Tel Aviv and at the Ponevezh Yeshiva. He then studied physics at Bar-Ilan University through the academic reserve program and earned his Ph.D. in 1980. From 1980 to 1982 he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University.

During the Yom Kippur War he served as a combat soldier on the Egyptian front.

He taught physics at Bar-Ilan University and moved to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1986. Starting in the mid-1980s, he used ideas from theoretical physics to study neural circuits, memory and learning. In 1992 he helped found the university's Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation, which he directed from 2008 to 2010.

Since 2006 he has directed the Swartz Program in Theoretical Neuroscience at Harvard. He holds that brain research shows there is no free will. He is married to Elisheva and has 5 children.