Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system and its functions. 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.
Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental processes. It addresses the questions of how cognitive activities are affected or controlled by neural circuits in the brain. Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of both neuroscience and psychology, overlapping with disciplines such as behavioral neuroscience, cognitive psychology, physiological psychology and affective neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience relies upon theories in cognitive science coupled with evidence from neurobiology, and computational modeling.
Antonio Damasio is a Portuguese-American neuroscientist. He is currently the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, as well as Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at the University of Southern California, and, additionally, an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. He was previously the chair of neurology at the University of Iowa for 20 years. Damasio heads the Brain and Creativity Institute, and has authored several books: his next to latest work, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (2010), explores the relationship between the brain and consciousness. Damasio's research in neuroscience has shown that emotions play a central role in social cognition and decision-making.
Terrence Joseph Sejnowski is the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and is the director of the Crick-Jacobs center for theoretical and computational biology. He has performed pioneering research in neural networks and computational neuroscience.
John Morgan Allman is an American neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, active in the fields of primates, cognition and evolutionary neuroscience.
Joseph E. LeDoux is an American neuroscientist whose research is primarily focused on survival circuits, including their impacts on emotions such as fear and anxiety. LeDoux is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at New York University, and director of the Emotional Brain Institute, a collaboration between NYU and New York State with research sites at NYU and the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in Orangeburg, New York. He is also the lead singer and songwriter in the band The Amygdaloids.
Cornelia Isabella "Cori" Bargmann is an American neurobiologist. She is known for her work on the genetic and neural circuit mechanisms of behavior using C. elegans, particularly the mechanisms of olfaction in the worm. She has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and had been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at UCSF and then Rockefeller University from 1995 to 2016. She was the Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative from 2016 to 2022. In 2012 she was awarded the $1 million Kavli Prize, and in 2013 the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
The Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI) is a center for neuroscience research at Princeton University. Founded in the spring of 2004, the PNI serves as a "stimulus for teaching and research in neuroscience and related fields" and "places particular emphasis on the close connection between theory, modeling, and experimentation using the most advanced technologies." It often partners with Princeton University's departments of Psychology and Molecular Biology.
Kay M. Tye is an American neuroscientist and professor and Wylie Vale Chair in the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences. Her research has focused on using optogenetics to identify connections in the brain that are involved in innate emotion, motivation and social behaviors.
The Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute is a non-profit institute founded by husband and wife Tianqiao Chen and Chrissy Luo with the aim of supporting study into the human brain. In 2016 the couple committed US$1 billion to support the institute’s work, which focuses on research in three core areas – brain discovery, brain treatment and brain development. Towards that end, the institute supports interdisciplinary research concerning neuroscience, particularly research on brain mechanics, perception, and the impact of perception on behavior and well-being.
Doris Ying Tsao is an American systems neuroscientist and professor of biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She was formerly on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology. She is recognized for pioneering the use of fMRI with single-unit electrophysiological recordings and for discovering the macaque face patch system for face perception. She is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the director of the T&C Chen Center for Systems Neuroscience. She won a MacArthur "Genius" fellowship in 2018. Tsao was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.
Moran Cerf is am American-French-Israeli neuroscientist, professor of business, investor and former white hat hacker.
Philipp Kanske is a German psychologist and neuroscientist. He is professor at Technische Universität Dresden. His research focuses on the neuronal foundations of emotion, emotion regulation and emotion understanding, as well as their changes in mental disorders. Philipp Kanske is speaker of the Junge Akademie.
Moriel Zelikowsky is a neuroscientist at University of Utah School of Medicine. Her laboratory studies the brain circuits and neural mechanisms underlying stress, fear, and social behavior. Her previous work includes fear and the hippocampus, and the role of neuropeptide Tac2 in social isolation.
Gloria Choi is an American neuroscientist and neuroimmunologist and the Samuel A. Goldblith Career Development Professor in the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Choi is known for elucidating the role of the immune system in the development of autism spectrum disorder-like phenotypes. Her lab currently explores how sensory experiences drive internal states and behavioural outcomes through probing the olfactory system as well as the neuroimmune system.
Abigail Marsh is a psychologist and neuroscientist who works as a professor at Georgetown University's Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program, where she is the director of the Laboratory on Social and Affective Neuroscience.
Dayu Lin is a neuroscientist and Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Neuroscience and Physiology at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine in New York City. Lin discovered the neural circuits in the hypothalamus that give rise to aggression in mice. Her lab at NYU now probes the neural circuits underlying innate social behaviors, with a focus on aggressive and defensive behaviors.
Kanaka Rajan is a neuroscientist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Friedman Brain Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Rajan trained in engineering, biophysics, and neuroscience, and has pioneered novel methods and models to understand how the brain processes sensory information. Her research seeks to understand how important cognitive functions — such as learning, remembering, and deciding — emerge from the cooperative activity of multi-scale neural processes, and how those processes are affected by various neuropsychiatric disease states. The resulting integrative theories about the brain bridge neurobiology and artificial intelligence.
Fan Wang is a neuroscientist and professor in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. She is an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Wang is known for her work identifying neural circuits underlying touch, pain, and anesthesia; and the development of a technique for capturing activated neuronal ensembles (CANE) to label and manipulate neurons activated by stimuli or behavioral paradigms.
