Grossberg has single-handedly elevated the psychophysics and psychology pioneered by Herman von Helmholtz and William James into a comprehensive mathematical theory of brain and behavior with profound implications and strong empirical support.
For the past 50 years, since his foundational articles appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1967-1980, Stephen Grossberg has been internationally recognized as the most important pioneer and current research leader who introduces and develops neural network models and mathematical methods for both biological and artificial intelligence. This work has always had its foundation in discoveries about biological and machine learning. More
generally, Grossberg is the world's leading scientist/engineer who discovers and models neural design principles and mechanisms that enable the behavior of individuals, or machines, to adapt autonomously in real time to unexpected environmental challenges. These discoveries have laid the scientific
foundations of the revolutionary computational paradigm of autonomous adaptive intelligence, and his neural network models have been applied to many large-scale problems in engineering and technology, notably the design of increasingly
autonomous adaptive algorithms and mobile agents. To acknowledge these contributions, Grossberg received the 2015 Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the 2017 Frank Rosenblatt Award of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, and the 2019 Donald O. Hebb Award of the International Neural Network Society.