John Hertz is an emeritus professor at the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics (NORDITA), an institute hosted by Stockholm University and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, as well as at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and worked at the University of Cambridge, UK, and the University of Chicago before moving to NORDITA in 1980. He has worked on problems in condensed matter and statistical physics, notably itinerant-electron magnetism, spin glasses, and artificial neural networks. In recent decades he has worked primarily in theoretical neuroscience, focusing particularly on cortical circuit dynamics and network inference.
