Gerry Leisman

University of Haifa

Gerry Leisman is an Israeli neuroscientist educated in Europe and the United States in Medicine, Neuroscience, and Biomedical Engineering at Manchester University. He received a PhD in Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering from Union University, in 1979. Currently, he is Professor of Neuro and Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Haifa and of Restorative Neurology at the Universidad de Ciencias Médicas de la Habana Facultad Manuel Fajardo Havana, Cuba. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Brain Body Cognition. His scientific career has largely been involved in two broad areas of endeavor. Firstly, he has been active since the early 1970s in the promotion of consciousness as a scientifically tractable problem, and has been particularly influential in arguing that a fundamental understanding of consciousness can be approached using the modern tools of neurobiology and understood by mechanisms of theoretical physics, having developed biomedical applications of continuum theory. He has also been influential in examining mechanisms of self-organizing systems in the brain and nervous system applied to cognitive functions exemplified by his work in memory, kinesiology, optimization, consciousness, death, and autism. He has likewise applied optimization strategies to movement and gait, cognition, and coma recovery. It is in this context that he, in the early 1970’s, was one of the first to identify functional disconnectivities in the brain and nervous system. He was elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science in 1990, a Senior Member of the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society of the IEEE in 1986, and a Life Fellow of the International Association of Functional Neurology and Rehabilitation in 2010, having received its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011. Secondly, in his long work in Rehabilitation Sciences, he has been able to apply the tools of Industrial Engineering to applications of optimization in human rehabilitation for those having sustained traumatic brain injury and developmental disabilities.  He has served as a consultant to the US National Sciences Foundation. He has published hundreds of papers in the Neurosciences, Engineering and Systems Sciences literature and is the holder of patents.