David Hunter Hubel FRS (February 27, 1926 – September 22, 2013) was an American Canadian neurophysiologist noted for his studies of the structure and function of the visual cortex.

He was co-recipient with Torsten Wiesel of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (shared with Roger W. Sperry), for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system.

For much of his career, Hubel worked as the Professor of Neurobiology at Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Medical School.

His father was a chemical engineer and Hubel developed a keen interest in science right from childhood, making many experiments in chemistry and electronics.

[3] From age six to eighteen, he attended Strathcona Academy in Outremont, Quebec, about which he said, "[I owe] much to the excellent teachers there, especially to Julia Bradshaw, a dedicated, vivacious history teacher with a memorable Irish temper, who awakened me to the possibility of learning how to write readable English.

[3][8][9][10][11][12] In 1954, Hubel moved to the United States to work at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine as an assistant resident in Neurology.

In 1958, Hubel moved to Johns Hopkins and began his collaborations with Wiesel, and discovered orientation selectivity and columnar organization in the visual cortex.

[20] Furthermore, the understanding of sensory processing in animals served as inspiration for the SIFT descriptor (Lowe, 1999), which is a local feature used in computer vision for tasks such as object recognition and wide-baseline matching, etc.