Joel Greenwood

Joel Greenwood is the founding director of the Kavli Center for Neurotechnology at Yale. The center is a state of the art design and fabrication facility, which provides training, tools and customized solutions for instrument design, experimental design and data collection.

Joel began his training in Neuroscience at the University of Washington in the first class of its inaugural Neuroscience major and earned his PhD at the University of California San Francisco in 2008. Joel then helped build and direct the Neuroengineering Core at Harvard until 2017 when he was recruited to found a new center based on the same model at Yale.

Outside of Yale Joel is active in the local community and is the current President of MakeHaven, a thriving makerspace in downtown New Haven that celebrated its 10th anniversary in August of 2022 and supports almost five hundred members. Joel is also an original member of Project Hexapod, which created the world’s largest walking hexapod robot. It still lives in Cambridge Massachusetts-and yes-it does walk. Joel has also received several honorarium grants from Burning Man for interactive fire art he has developed, built and brought to Black Rock City.