Mind/Brain Institute > James Knierim
James Knierim

James Knierim

Professor of Neuroscience

Contact Information

Research Interests: Behavioral Neurophysiology of the Hippocampal Formation

Education: PhD, California Institute of Technology

Dr. James Knierim is a professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His research focuses on the neurophysiology of memory in the hippocampal formation. Dr. Knierim is a researcher at the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins.

His work has investigated how the zero-gravity environment of NASA's Space Shuttle affects spatial orientation; how the sense of direction (your "internal compass") affects spatial perceptions; and how objects and landmarks become incorporated into the brain's "cognitive map" of an environment in ways that are crucial for the normal formation of long-term memories. Currently, Dr. Knierim is focused on understanding the information processing that occurs in different stages of the hippocampus, from the input representations of the entorhinal cortex through the different subregions within the hippocampus.

After graduating from Haverford College with a BA in psychology, he obtained his PhD in neurobiology at California Institute of Technology, where he studied the primate visual system with David Van Essen. He then did a postdoctoral fellowship with Bruce McNaughton at the University of Arizona, where he studied the spatial firing characteristics of place cells and head direction cells of the rat hippocampus and limbic system. In 1998, he started his own laboratory in the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. He joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 2009.