Priya R. Banerjee

This award is very hard to respond to. I have received many hundred congratulatory notes, from former students, post-docs, Princeton University juniors and seniors, funding agencies and foundations, authors, signature collectors, amateurs, elementary school neural network followers, and on and on. An astonishing fraction of them has found their way into useful and interesting Neural Network careers by a casual interaction in class, at a meeting, hearing what I had to say about their ideas, learning from thinking about how I worked with a class, or from being my teaching assistants... There are some whom I remember well, and others for whom my reaction is “are they certain that our interaction sparked a single usable thought?” Yet they go on and comment “you changed my life” and follow on to explain that they heard me lecture when they were 15, and have been a member of the Neural Network brigade of the research army ever afterward. I cannot make detailed comments to most of my letter writers. In sum I can only say that I tremendously enjoyed the interactions that the Neural Network community provided me with; that the mutual interactions have given me much pleasure over the years; that the community interested both in brain and in artificial brain has proved a good way for science to develop even if institutions have not always been sympathetic. Often these institutions found the enthusiasm infectious, after a period of doubt. In short, we often have won--. No, perhaps all we know is that we have not yet lost. I still believe that finding mind lodged in biological matter is the most profound question that physics can pose. And that the breadth of physics is a good base from which to begin.

What a night! During our 2024 investiture ceremony at the Library of Congress last night, a total of 60 people became members of the Academy.