Dr. Bower is a computational neurobiologist who received his PhD in neurophysiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and completed postdoctoral studies at New York University and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. His first faculty appointment was at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where for over 17 years he helped found the first graduate program in computational neuroscience. Subsequent to Caltech, he was a professor of Computational Neuroscience within the University of Texas System.  

In addition to model and experimental based research on the olfactory system and cerebellum, Dr. Bower’s laboratory has also been involved in numerous infrastructure projects, including constructing GENESIS, one of the first simulation platforms supporting detailed models of neuronal structures. Dr. Bower also founded the annual international conference on Computational Neuroscience, the first summer courses in computational neuroscience in the United States, Europe and Latin America, and the Journal of Computational Neuroscience. Dr. Bower was also involved in the re-emergence of neural networks, co- organizing the first NIPS meeting, (recently re-named NEurIPS), which has become one of the largest and most important annual meetings in Machine Learning.  Dr. Bower is the author of many scientific research articles and has edited and written numerous books.  While he is now officially retired, he remains an affiliate faculty member at Southern Oregon University and the University of Hertfordshire in the UK.

In addition to his work in science, Dr. Bower has also had a long-standing interest and involvement in science education and digital-based educational innovation. While a professor at Caltech, Dr. Bower founded and for 17 years co-directed the Caltech Precollege Science Initiative (CAPSI) a multi-million-dollar hands-on science education outreach program to majority minority school districts in the State of California. While supporting the introduction of hands-on science learning in public schools, Dr. Bower’s efforts in CAPSI also explored the use of digital technology in support of science learning. In 1998 Dr. Bower founded Numedeon Incorporated, which in 1999 launched Whyville.net the first game-based learning virtual world. Whyville now has over 8.5 million cumulative registered users worldwide. In 2014, Dr. Bower founded the company Virtual Worlds IP, intended to support the wider application of the simulation-game-based virtual world learning engine developed using Whyville. That technology is protected by a core and foundation patent in online virtual worlds (US patent # 7,925,703).