Jason Shepherd.

Jason Shepherd

Professor of neurobiology
University of Utah

Jason Shepherd is professor of neurobiology and holds the Jon M. Huntsman Presidential Chair at the University of Utah. He obtained his B.Sc. (Hons) at the University of Otago, his Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and his postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Shepherd is a recipient of the Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award in Neuroscience, the International Society for Neurochemistry Young Scientist Lectureship Award, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Ben Barres Early Career Acceleration Award, the NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award, the Brain Research Foundation Scientific Innovation Award and the McKnight Foundation Neurobiology of Brain Disorders Award. He is also a National Academy of Sciences Kavli fellow.

Explore more from The Transmitter

Illustration of waterfall inside a woman's brain.

Revisiting the neural correlates of consciousness

Life happens in real time, but experience may be composed in ragtime—like the music genre, full of offbeat notes and uneven rhythms. The assumption that waking life consists of a “stream” of conscious representations has inadvertently led consciousness science to its current impasse.

By Francis T. Fallon, Michael Pitts
28 September 2026 | 7 min read
Illustration of rolling dice.

Grant review needs reform. How about we add an element of chance?

A process that uses a lottery system saves time, reduces strategic resubmission and accepts that, above a quality threshold, luck has always played a part in science funding.

By Adrien Peyrache
25 September 2026 | 6 min read
Research diagram of gene expression.

Fly neurons carry molecular signatures of their origins

The pattern of transcription factors a Drosophila neuron expresses offers clues to its lineage and birth order—and ultimately how neural circuits emerge.

By Alissa de Chassey
25 September 2026 | 5 min read