Congratulations to The Brain Prize 2024 winners!

05 March 2024

FENS News, Neuroscience News, Society & Partner News

FENS sends warm congratulations to The Brain Prize 2024 winners:

Larry Abbott (USA, William Bloor Professor of Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia’s Zuckerman Mind, Brain, Behavior Institute)

Terrence Sejnowski (USA, Francis Crick Professor, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies & Distinguished Professor of Neurobiology, UC San Diego)

Haim Sompolinsky (Israel/USA, Professor, Harvard University and Hebrew University)

The Brain Prize is awarded each year by the Lundbeck Foundation in recognition of highly original and influential advances in any area of brain research, from basic neuroscience to applied clinical research. The Brain Prize is first and foremost a celebration of outstanding science and outstanding scientists, but it is also an opportunity to raise awareness of the winners, their science, and their field.

Professor Richard Morris, Chair of The Brain Prize selection committee explains the reasoning behind this year’s award:

“Theoretical and computational neuroscience permeates neuroscience today and is of increasingly growing importance. Larry Abbott, Haim Sompolinsky and Terrence Sejnowski have made pioneering contributions to the field and have made seminal discoveries in our understanding of the principles that govern the brain’s structure, dynamics and the emergence of cognition and behaviour. All three candidates originally trained in physics, but they have long worked in neuroscience and have applied novel and sophisticated approaches from physics, mathematics, and statistics to the analysis of highly complex datasets acquired by experimental neuroscientists. They have also proposed conceptual frameworks for understanding some of the brain’s most fundamental processes and how these may go awry in some of the most devastating disorders of the nervous system. Their scientific achievements have also paved the way for the development of brain-inspired artificial intelligence, one of the emerging and transformational technologies of our time.”