Alan Gevins

Alan Gevins first began working on making a "little black box" that measured EEG signals of attention as an undergraduate at MIT. He says it was a harder problem than he first thought. He received a BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967, and qualified for a Ph.D. in cognitive science from the California Institute of Asian Studies in 1971. In 1972, he joined the Electroencephalography (EEG) Laboratory of the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute at the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco as a Senior Operations Research Analyst and became Director of the laboratory in 1974. He incorporated the EEG Systems Laboratory as an independent non-profit institute in 1980, now known as The San Francisco Brain Research Institute. Since, as a nonprofit, SFBRI was not eligible to apply for Federal grants that could support development of technology needed for his research, in 1986 he founded SAM Technology, which he named after Uncle SAM.

Alan is internationally known for pioneering basic science and engineering research on brain electrical signals of human cognition, and is the first author of more than 100 scientific publications (including five in the journal Science) and of 19 US patents. His research has been supported continuously since 1972 by competitive grants from the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Strokes, The National Institute of Mental Health, The National Institute of Aging, The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, The National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse, The National Institute of Drug Abuse, The Air Force Research Laboratory, The Office of Naval Research and DARPA.