Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system, its functions, and its 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.
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.
Computational neuroscience is a branch of neuroscience which employs mathematics, computer science, theoretical analysis and abstractions of the brain to understand the principles that govern the development, structure, physiology and cognitive abilities of the nervous system.
Fred Kavli was a Norwegian-American businessman and philanthropist. He was born on a small farm in Eresfjord, Norway. He founded the Kavlico Corporation, located in Moorpark, California. Under his leadership, the company became one of the world's largest suppliers of sensors for aeronautic, automotive, and industrial applications supplying General Electric and the Ford Motor Company.
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.
The Gruber Prize in Neuroscience, established in 2004, is one of three international awards worth US$500,000 made by the Gruber Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
The Kavli Prize was established in 2005 as a joint venture of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, and the Kavli Foundation. It honors, supports, and recognizes scientists for outstanding work in the fields of astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience. Three prizes are awarded every second year. Each of the three Kavli Prizes consists of a gold medal, a scroll, and a cash award of US$1,000,000. The medal has a diameter of 70 millimetres (2.8 in), a thickness of 5 millimetres (0.20 in), and weighs 311 grams (11.0 oz).
The Kavli Foundation, based in Los Angeles, California, is a foundation that supports the advancement of science and the increase of public understanding and support for scientists and their work.
Larry Ryan Squire is an American psychiatrist and neuroscientist. He is a professor of psychiatry, neurosciences, and psychology at the University of California, San Diego, and a Senior Research Career Scientist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Diego. He is a leading investigator of the neurological bases of memory, which he studies using animal models and human patients with memory impairment.
Karl John Friston FRS FMedSci FRSB is a British neuroscientist and theoretician at University College London. He is an authority on brain imaging and theoretical neuroscience, especially the use of physics-inspired statistical methods to model neuroimaging data and other random dynamical systems. Friston is a key architect of the free energy principle and active inference. In imaging neuroscience he is best known for statistical parametric mapping and dynamic causal modelling. Friston also acts as a scientific advisor to numerous groups in industry.
Robert H. Wurtz is an American neuroscientist working as a NIH Distinguished Scientist and Chief of the Section on Visuomotor Integration at the National Eye Institute. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is recognised for developing methods for studying the visual system in 'awake-behaving' primates, a technique now widely used for the study of higher brain functions. He pioneered the study of the neuronal basis of vision and its relation with cognitive functions.
The Minerva Foundation is a US-based non-profit, scientific and charitable foundation. It is headquartered in Berkeley, California. It was established in 1983 by Helen and Elwin Marg. Other than the founders, directors include Richard M. Buxbaum, Lawrence W. Stark, Semir Zeki, Tamia Marg Anderson, Lila S. Crutchfield, and Vero Bollow.
Daniel Mark Wolpert FRS FMedSci is a British medical doctor, neuroscientist and engineer, who has made important contributions in computational biology. He was Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge from 2005, and also became the Royal Society Noreen Murray Research Professorship in Neurobiology from 2013. He is now Professor of Neurobiology at Columbia University.
The Karl Spencer Lashley Award is awarded by The American Philosophical Society as a recognition of research on the integrative neuroscience of behavior. The award was established in 1957 by a gift from Dr. Karl Spencer Lashley.
The Brain Prize, formerly known as The Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Prize, is an international scientific award honouring "one or more scientists who have distinguished themselves by an outstanding contribution to neuroscience and who are still active in research". Founded in 2011 by the Lundbeck Foundation, the prize is associated with a DKK 10 million award to the nominees, the world’s largest brain research prize.
Michael Neil Shadlen is an American neuroscientist and neurologist, whose research concerns the neural mechanisms of decision-making. He has been Professor of Neuroscience at Columbia University since 2012 and a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator since 2000. He is a member of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science, a Principal Investigator at the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and National Academy of Sciences.
Doris Ying Tsao is an American neuroscientist and professor of neurobiology and molecular cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She was formerly on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology for 12 years. 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. In 2024 she was awarded a Kavli Prize in neuroscience along with Nancy Kanwisher and Winrich Freiwald for the discovery and study of specific areas in the brain that perform facial recognition. Also in 2024 she received the Rosenstiel Award. After joining UC Berkeley in 2021, her current research explores visual perception in primates in order to understand how the brain creates our sense of reality.
Okihide Hikosaka is a neuroscience research professor who specializes in the mechanisms of motivation, learning, skill, decision-making, attention, and oculomotor control. His research into neuronal mechanisms of voluntary behavior and basal ganglia function created breakthroughs in the understanding of the neurochemistry behind information-seeking behavior and the efficacy of grouping motor sequence learning actions in order to remember more than individual actions.
Wolfram Schultz is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge known for his discovery of the neurophysiological dopamine reward signal.
