Michael Chorost is a technology theorist with an unusual perspective: his body is the future. In 2001 he went completely deaf and had a computer implanted in his head to let him hear again. This transformative experience inspired his first book, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human. He wrote about how mastering his new ear, a cochlear implant, enabled him to enhance his creative potential as a human being.

Dr. Chorost earned his B.A. at Brown University and studied computer programming, Renaissance drama, and cultural theory on the way to his Ph.D. at UT-Austin. He doesn’t draw sharp lines between programming, science, writing, and art; to him, these are all profoundly creative human endeavors.

After graduate school he worked briefly for Scient, a dot-com in San Francisco, and then spent 4 1/2 years doing research in education at SRI International in Menlo Park, California.

As a freelance science writer he has written for Wired, The Washington Post, Technology Review, and The Scientist, among others. He sits on external advisory boards for neuroscience research at Northwestern and Brown. He has given over 150 lectures at institutions such as Google, MIT, Stanford, Brown, the Brookings Institute, and the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco.