Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system, its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developmental biology, cytology, psychology, physics, computer science, chemistry, medicine, statistics, and mathematical modeling to understand the fundamental and emergent properties of neurons, glia and neural circuits. The understanding of the biological basis of learning, memory, behavior, perception, and consciousness has been described by Eric Kandel as the "epic challenge" of the biological sciences.
Margaret Stratford Livingstone is the Takeda Professor of Neurobiology in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School in the field of visual perception. She authored the book Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing. She was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.
Torsten Nils Wiesel is a Swedish neurophysiologist. With David H. Hubel, he received the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system; the prize was shared with Roger W. Sperry for his independent research on the cerebral hemispheres.
David Hunter Hubel 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, 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. In 1978, Hubel and Wiesel were awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University. In 1983, Hubel received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
A cortical column is a group of neurons forming a cylindrical structure through the cerebral cortex of the brain perpendicular to the cortical surface. The structure was first identified by Mountcastle in 1957. He later identified minicolumns as the basic units of the neocortex which were arranged into columns. Each contains the same types of neurons, connectivity, and firing properties. Columns are also called hypercolumn, macrocolumn, functional column or sometimes cortical module. Neurons within a minicolumn (microcolumn) encode similar features, whereas a hypercolumn "denotes a unit containing a full set of values for any given set of receptive field parameters". A cortical module is defined as either synonymous with a hypercolumn (Mountcastle) or as a tissue block of multiple overlapping hypercolumns.
The Ferrier Lecture is a Royal Society lectureship given every three years "on a subject related to the advancement of natural knowledge on the structure and function of the nervous system". It was created in 1928 to honour the memory of Sir David Ferrier, a neurologist who was the first British scientist to electronically stimulate the brain for the purpose of scientific study.
Complex cells can be found in the primary visual cortex (V1), the secondary visual cortex (V2), and Brodmann area 19 (V3).
Carla J. Shatz is an American neurobiologist and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine.
Winfried Denk is a German physicist. He built the first two-photon microscope while he was a graduate student in Watt W. Webb's lab at Cornell University, in 1989.
Catherine Dulac is a French–American biologist. She is the Higgins Professor in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University, where she served as department chair from 2007 to 2013. She is also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She was born in 1963 in France. She came to the United States for her postdoctoral study in 1991.
Michael Greenberg is an American neuroscientist who specializes in molecular neurobiology. He served as the Chair of the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School from 2008 to 2022.
Feature detection is a process by which the nervous system sorts or filters complex natural stimuli in order to extract behaviorally relevant cues that have a high probability of being associated with important objects or organisms in their environment, as opposed to irrelevant background or noise.
Christine Elizabeth Holt FRS, FMedSci is a British developmental neuroscientist.
Rosalind Anne Segal is an American neurobiologist. She is a Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute., and the Dean for Graduate Education at Harvard Medical School Segal's work employs modern methods of cell and molecular biology to study the development of the mammalian brain with the goal of understanding how disruption of this normal process leads to the formation of brain malignancies.
Hilmar Bading is a German physician and neuroscientist. He is a member of the German National Academy of Science Leopoldina.
A. James Hudspeth is the F.M. Kirby Professor at Rockefeller University in New York City, where he is director of the F.M. Kirby Center for Sensory Neuroscience. His laboratory studies the physiological basis of hearing.
Yang Dan is a Chinese-American neuroscientist. She is the Paul Licht Distinguished Professor of Neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. She is a past recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, Beckman Young Investigator Award, and Society for Neuroscience Research Awards for Innovation in Neuroscience. Recognized for her research on the neural circuits that control behavior, she was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2018.
Chenghua Gu is a Professor of Neurobiology at the Harvard Medical School where her research focuses on the Blood–brain barrier. She is also part of the Harvard Brain Science Initiative and has won numerous awards for her groundbreaking research on the brain's vascular component.
Michael Paul Stryker is an American neuroscientist specializing in studies of how spontaneous neural activity organizes connections in the developing mammalian brain, and for research on the organization, development, and plasticity of the visual system in the ferret and the mouse.
Ehud Zohary is an Israeli scientist, professor of neurobiology at the Edmond and Lilly Safra Center for Brain Science and Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
