Michael E. Goldberg

David Mahoney Professor of Brain and Behavior
Columbia University

Michael E. Goldberg is David Mahoney Professor of Brain and Behavior in the departments of neuroscience, neurology, psychiatry and ophthalmology at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, director of the Mahoney-Keck Center for Brain and Behavior Research, and is an active clinical neurologist. His neuroscience research focuses on the physiological basis of cognitive processes such as visual attention, spatial perception and decision-making. He earned his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1968. From 1978 to 2001, Goldberg was a senior investigator at the Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research at the National Eye Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a past president of the Society for Neuroscience, and now chair of the society’s Committee on Animals in Research.

Explore more from The Transmitter

Monkeys at Dutch primate center.

Dutch primate center awaits October animal research debate

Science is forging ahead at the Biomedical Primate Research Centre in the Netherlands, following a reversal of last year’s mandate to phase out primate studies. But researchers aren’t sure how long the reprieve will last.

By Lauren Schenkman
2 September 2026 | 5 min read

When we sleep, our brain is filled with spontaneous neural activity. What is it doing?

Daniel Levenstein explains how internally generated brain activity during sleep shapes our cognition, and why NeuroAI is such a powerful approach to understanding the brain.

By Paul Middlebrooks
2 September 2026 | 96 min listen
Research image of organoids.

Unconfounding genetic and environmental factors, and more

Here is a roundup of autism-related news and research spotted around the web for the week of 31 August.

By Jill Adams
1 September 2026 | 2 min read