Jeff Yoshimi joined UC Merced in 2004 as a founding faculty member in philosophy and cognitive science, and he's honored to be featured on his 20-year work anniversary. He studies the structure of consciousness and its relationship to neural activity, and models that relationship using computational and mathematical tools (primarily neural networks and dynamical systems theory). He is also interested in using carefully designed visualizations to facilitate scientific reasoning, citizen science, education, debate, and the study of scholarly literatures. He considers himself lucky to have been on the ground-floor at a new university committed to interdisciplinary research, since it has allowed him to develop his many and varied interests through a wide range of collaborations. He has published five books and numerous articles in multiple scholarly fields, most recently two books with MIT Press, one on representational dynamics in simple agents (The Open Dynamics of Braitenberg Vehicles), and another on using gamified citizen science to facilitate cancer research (Gaming Cancer: How Building and Playing Video Games Can Accelerate Scientific Discovery).
