Reza Shadmehr
Reza Shadmehr (born 1963 in Tehran, Iran) is an Iranian-American professor of Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. He is known for his work in motor control, motor learning, and computational neuroscience. He moved to the United States at age 14 and grew up in Spokane, Washington, raised by foster parents Lee and Evelyn Applingtion.
He earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from Gonzaga University in 1985 (summa cum laude). He did robotics research at the University of Southern California with Michael A. Arbib as an IBM Graduate Fellow, completing his PhD in 1991. He then was a McDonnell-Pew Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, mentored by Emilio Bizzi. He joined Johns Hopkins in 1995 and led the PhD program in Biomedical Engineering from 2007 to 2018. He was elected a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2017 and received a Javits Neuroscience Award in 2022.
Shadmehr studies how the brain controls arm and eye movements using computational, behavioral, and neurophysiological methods in humans and monkeys. His central idea is to use robotics and control theory to understand brain movement control. At MIT, he helped develop the force-field paradigm to study how the brain learns internal models that predict the physics of movement. This work showed that the cerebellum helps transform motor commands into predictions of sensory consequences, with neural models learned through prediction errors. He also contributed to understanding how cerebellar neurons are organized into populations that make predictions and learn from errors, a concept called population coding that helps explain how internal models link actions to their outcomes.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 13:29 (CET).