CHICAGO – The Society of Neuroscience (SfN) will honor leading researchers whose groundbreaking work has transformed neuroscience — including the understanding of pain, addiction, stress, synaptic transport, vision, and sleep — with this year’s Outstanding Career and Research Achievement Awards. The awards will be presented during SfN’s annual meeting.
“The Society is honored to recognize this outstanding group of neuroscientists, whose breadth of scientific curiosity and innovation has led to breakthrough insights, landmark models, and revisions to major neuroscientific theories,” SfN President Marina Picciotto, said. “Their work not only elucidates molecular mechanisms and circuits in the brain, but also transforms these insights into new clinical options for a range of diseases from addiction and mental health disorders to neurodegenerative diseases.”
Ralph W. Gerard Prize in Neuroscience: Allan Basbaum and Nora Volkow
The Ralph W. Gerard Prize in Neuroscience — the highest recognition conferred by SfN — recognizes outstanding scientists who have made significant contributions to neuroscience throughout their careers. The prize is named for the revered neuroscientist Dr. Ralph W. Gerard who was instrumental in establishing the Society for Neuroscience and served as its honorary president.
Allan Basbaum, PhD, the chair of the department of anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco, is a preeminent leader of the pain research field and has been instrumental in bringing his deep knowledge of anatomy and physiology to the understanding of the neurobiology of pain. He has helped map the neuroanatomy of the pain system, contributed a landmark model of endogenous pain control circuitry still used forty years later, and combined neuroanatomical and pharmacological approaches to identify several promising therapeutic options for both acute and chronic pain. Basbaum also studied the interface of certain types of pain with neuroimmune mechanisms and introduced spinal cord cell transplants to restore inhibitory control for pain relief. His work has not only provided important insights into the clinical management of pain, but also revealed that neuropathic pain is, in fact, a disease of the nervous system, not merely a symptom produced by injury.
Nora D. Volkow, MD, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, made seminal contributions to the understanding of the neurobiological basis of drug addiction. She pioneered the use of non-invasive human brain imaging to investigate how the use of substances such as heroin, cocaine, and cannabis affect brain functions. These studies documented how changes in the dopamine system affect the functions of brain regions involved with reward and self-control in addiction. The detailed knowledge she provided about the neuropathological consequences of continued exposure to such powerful drugs led to the conclusion that drug addiction is a brain disorder. Her neuroimaging work has also made significant contributions to the understanding of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and obesity. Over her long career, Volkow has played an instrumental role first in developing brain imaging methods to study brain metabolism and chemistry and then using those novel tools to define the pathophysiology of drug addiction and other disorders in humans.
Jacob P. Waletzky Award: Erin Calipari
The Jacob P. Waletzky award recognizes an early career scientist (within fifteen years of his or her PhD or MD degree) whose independent research has led to significant conceptual and empirical contributions to the understanding of drug addiction and who plans to continue to make significant contributions to addiction research and treatment. The award is endowed by The Waletzky Award Prize Fund and the Waletzky Family. The recipient receives a $30,000 prize and complimentary registration and travel to SfN’s annual meeting.
Erin Calipari, PhD, an associate professor at Vanderbilt University and the director of the Vanderbilt Center for Addiction Research, has reshaped the thinking of how behavioral circuits are dysregulated by long-term drug use. Her innovative, multidisciplinary approach has made her a leader in the field of addiction neurobiology who has redefined how motivational systems, such as the dopamine system, mediate learning, memory, and adaptive behavior at the systems and molecular level. Her current research program seeks to characterize and modulate the brain circuits that underlie both adaptive and maladaptive processes in reward, motivation, and associative learning that are relevant for addiction. Consistent with clinical data, her research has demonstrated that repeated drug exposure leads to deficiencies in dopamine release that persist with abstinence. She has recently published a series of high-impact studies combining state-of-the-art neuroscience methods and computational models suggesting that a main role of dopamine is to signal salience of a given stimulus, independent of the stimulus’s valence (aversive or appetitive). Her current research, which is based on a formalized model of dopamine as a salience signal, focuses on the effect of addictive drugs on this signal. Beyond these research accomplishments, Calipari is shaping the future of the field through her abiding commitment to train and support the next generation of addiction scientists, including many that are underrepresented in science. Her dedication to mentoring and her passion for raising public awareness to destigmatize addiction coupled with her exceptional research accomplishments enables Calipari to have far reaching influence on the field of substance use disorders.
Julius Axelrod Prize: Robert Edwards and Marian Joëls
The Julius Axelrod Prize honors scientists with distinguished achievements in the broad field of neuropharmacology or related area and exemplary efforts in mentoring early career scientists. The award, endowed by the Eli Lilly and Company Foundation, includes a $30,000 prize shared by the recipients, in addition to complimentary registration and travel to SfN’s annual meeting. In addition, the recipients are invited to give the keynote address for a symposium at the National Institute of Mental Health in the spring of 2025.
Robert Edwards, MD, professor of neurology and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, has made outstanding contributions to the understanding of neurotransmitter transport into synaptic vesicles. He identified the proteins responsible, characterized the mechanisms and regulation of transport and used this information to elucidate fundamental questions about the regulation of transmitter release and its role in information processing. Edwards identified the first vesicular neurotransmitter transporter — the vesicular monoamine transporter — and the vesicular transporters for most other classical transmitters including GABA/glycine, acetylcholine and glutamate. Using these proteins, he has found that individual neurons can release two transmitters with different properties, leading to a revised view of neurotransmitter release and signaling. He has also used the vesicle transporters to elucidate the biogenesis of dense core vesicles. In addition, he has studied the function of the presynaptic protein alpha-synuclein to understand the central role of this protein in the pathogenesis of Parkinson’s disease (PD). Edwards has thus elucidated multiple poorly understood features of neurotransmitter release, connecting molecular and biophysical mechanisms to physiology and behavior. Edwards has also mentored nearly 100 undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows, and is recognized for his engaging, passionate, and personal support of his trainees and their work.
Marian Joëls, PhD, an emeritus professor at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, has made seminal contributions to the knowledge of the effects of stress on the brain, from the molecular level to the level of patient populations. Using neuropharmacological and electrophysiological approaches, she disentangled the roles of glucocorticoid hormones — acting via glucocorticoid and mineralocorticoid receptors on cellular and synaptic function, and gene expression — and how they affect processes like metaplasticity, memory, fear, and stress resilience, in both humans and preclinical models. She is a pioneer in the discovery of non-genomic signaling by corticosteroids and in the impact of early life adversity on cellular function and behavior. She also is a leader in distinguishing the differences between the acute and chronic effects of stress, implicated in the genesis of psychopathology. Her innovations may prove critical for the development of treatment options for psychiatric disorders. Joëls has been a tireless mentor and role model, as well as a lifelong champion of the equal participation of women in science, particularly through her efforts as president of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies and dean of the Groningen Medical School. She advocated for a better gender balance of conference speakers and initiated network organizations for talented junior and mid-career scientists. She helped develop differentiated career paths, thus paving the way for future scientists to work in an academic climate that recognizes and rewards diverse talents.
Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience: Eero Simoncelli
The Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience is given to an individual whose activities have produced a significant cumulative contribution to theoretical models or computational methods in neuroscience or who has made a particularly noteworthy recent advance in theoretical or computational neuroscience. The prize is endowed by the Swartz Foundation and the recipient receives a $30,000 award and complimentary registration and travel to SfN’s annual meeting.
Eero Simoncelli, PhD, a professor of neural science, mathematics, data science and psychology at New York University, and the inaugural director of the Center for Computational Neuroscience at the Flatiron Institute, is one of the most influential and widely recognized computational neuroscientists in the world. His work in both theoretical and computational neuroscience provides fundamental contributions to our understanding of how the nervous system represents visual stimuli. Throughout his career he has pursued the idea that the visual system is optimized — through evolution and development — to process and represent statistical regularities in natural images. Simoncelli’s work, both theoretical and empirical, provides compelling evidence in support of the exploitation of these regularities in efficient encoding and optimal extraction of information from visual stimuli.
Simoncelli also develops novel empirical approaches for testing theories of brain function, and for bridging the gap between neural representation and perceptual capabilities. He has developed and tested theories of human visual motion representation and created what is widely considered the standard model of visual motion perception. He has developed a model for neural representation in visual cortical area V2 that predicts human texture perception, and an analogous auditory representation that predicts perception of auditory stimuli that he calls “sound textures.” In complementary lines of work, he has developed image processing methods for denoising, compression, and texture synthesis. These algorithms rival or outperform contemporary algorithms, and all follow directly from the same simple yet profound observations about the statistical regularities of natural stimuli.
Simoncelli's multidisciplinary range, creative innovation, and the significance and depth of his theoretical and empirical work has led to better understanding of the basic principles underlying the function of the visual system. Finally, in an unusual honor for a neuroscientist, Simoncelli received an Emmy Award for his development a widely used perceptually based measure of image quality.
Peter Seeburg Integrative Neuroscience Prize: Yang Dan
The Peter Seeburg Integrative Neuroscience Prize, endowed by the Schaller-Nikolich Foundation, honors original and groundbreaking achievements in neuroscience. Named after Peter H. Seeburg, a German neuroscientist and pioneer in molecular neurobiology, the prize recognizes outstanding advances in the understanding of executive brain functions and cognitive processes. The recipient receives a $100,000 prize.
Yang Dan, PhD, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley, was presented the Prize at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) Forum 2024 on June 26 in Vienna, Austria, for her groundbreaking research on neuronal networks that control sleep. In even years, the Prize is presented at the FENS Forum and in odd years, the Prize is presented at the SfN annual meeting. A press release highlighting Dan’s award-winning research can be found on the SfN website. She will also be acknowledged at Neuroscience 2024.
###
The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) is an organization of nearly 35,000 basic scientists and clinicians who study the brain and the nervous system.
END