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.
Ann Martin Graybiel is an Institute Professor and a faculty member in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She is an expert on the basal ganglia and the neurophysiology of habit formation, implicit learning, and her work is relevant to Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, obsessive–compulsive disorder, substance abuse and other disorders that affect the basal ganglia.
The White House BRAIN Initiative is a collaborative, public-private research initiative announced by the Obama administration on April 2, 2013, with the goal of supporting the development and application of innovative technologies that can create a dynamic understanding of brain function.
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.
Jeanne Frances Loring is an American stem cell biologist, developmental neurobiologist, and geneticist. She is the founding Director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine and emeritus professor at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. She has founded two biotechnology companies, Arcos BioScience (1999) and Aspen Neuroscience (2018)
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.
Sergiu P. Pașca is a Romanian-American scientist and physician at Stanford University in California. Pașca is a Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and the Bonnie Uytengsu and Family Director of Stanford Brain Organogenesis, a neuroscientist and stem cell biologist and currently a New York Stem Cell Foundation Robertson Investigator. He is part of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute, Stanford Bio-X and a fellow of the ChEM-H Institute at Stanford. Pașca was listed among New York Times Visionaries in Medicine and Sciences, and he is the recipient of the 2018 Vilcek Award for Creative Biomedical Promise from the Vlicek Foundation. In 2022, he gave a TED talk on reverse engineering the human brain in the laboratory
Sarah M. N. Woolley is a neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology at Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute. Her work centers on the neuroscience of communication, using songbirds to understand how the brain learns and understands vocal communication.
Jeffrey D. Macklis is an American neuroscientist. He is the Max and Anne Wien Professor of Life Sciences in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and Center for Brain Science at Harvard University, Professor of Neurology [Neuroscience] at Harvard Medical School, and on the Executive Committee and a Member of the Principal Faculty of the Neuroscience / Nervous System Diseases Program at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.
HollisT. Cline is an American neuroscientist who currently serves as the Director of the Dorris Neuroscience Center at the Scripps Research Institute located in California. Her research focuses on the impact of sensory experience on brain development and plasticity.
Mala Murthy is a Professor in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute at Princeton University. Her work centers around how the brain extracts important information from the sensory world and utilises that information to modulate behavior in a social context. She is most known for her work in acoustic communication and song production in courting Drosophila fruit flies. Murthy and colleagues have also published an automated system for measuring animal pose in movies with one or more animal.
Mackenzie W. Mathis, is an American neuroscientist and principal investigator at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Her lab investigates adaptive mechanisms in biological and artificial intelligence to inform adaptive AI systems and translational research in neurological diseases.
Ilana B. Witten is an American neuroscientist and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. Witten studies the mesolimbic pathway, with a focus on the striatal neural circuit mechanisms driving reward learning and decision making.
Dragana Rogulja is a Serbian neuroscientist and circadian biologist who is an assistant professor in Neurobiology within the Harvard Medical School Blavatnik Institute of Neurobiology. Rogulja explores the molecular mechanisms governing sleep in Drosophila as well as probing how circadian mechanisms integrate sensory information to drive behavior. Rogulja uses mating behavior in Drosophila to explore the neural circuits linking internal states to motivated behaviors.
Kanaka Rajan is a neuroscientist and associate 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.
Lauren Orefice is an American neuroscientist and assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital and in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. Orefice has made innovative discoveries about the role of peripheral nerves and sensory hypersensitivity in the development of Autism-like behaviors. Her research now focuses on exploring the basic biology of somatosensory neural circuits for both touch and gastrointestinal function in order to shed light on how peripheral sensation impacts brain development and susceptibility to diseases like Autism Spectrum Disorders.
Theanne Griffith is an American neuroscientist and children's book author. She is an assistant professor of Physiology and Membrane Biology at the University of California, Davis.
Hey-Kyoung Lee is a neuroscience professor at Johns Hopkins University. She studies cross-modal plasticity between visual and auditory systems.
Bianxiao Cui is the current Job and Gertrud Tamaki Professor of Chemistry and a fellow of the Stanford Neuroscience Institute at Stanford University.
Susan Ellen Shore is an American audiologist who is the Merle Lawrence Collegiate Professor of Otolaryngology at the University of Michigan. She was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2021.
