Robert Desimone is director of the McGovern Institute and the Doris and Don Berkey Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before joining MIT, in 2004, he was director of the Intramural Research Program at the National Institutes of Mental Health, the largest mental-health research center in the world. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of numerous awards, including the Troland Prize of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Golden Brain Award of the Minerva Foundation.