The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and science.
Charles William Eliot was an American academic who was president of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909, the longest term of any Harvard president. A member of the prominent Eliot family of Boston, he transformed Harvard from a respected provincial college into America's preeminent research university. Theodore Roosevelt called him "the only man in the world I envy."
Nancy Gail Kanwisher FBA is the Walter A Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She studies the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying human visual perception and cognition.
The history of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology can be traced back to the 1861 incorporation of the "Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston Society of Natural History" led primarily by William Barton Rogers.
The Weizmann Women & Science Award is a biennial award established in 1994 to honor an outstanding woman scientist in the United States who has made significant contributions to the scientific community. The objective of the award, which includes a $25,000 research grant to the recipient, is to promote women in science, and to provide a strong role model to motivate and encourage the next generation of young women scientists.
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.
Carola Blitzman Eisenberg was an Argentine-American psychiatrist who became the first woman to hold the position of Dean of Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1978 to 1990, she was the dean of student affairs at Harvard Medical School (HMS). She was a long-time lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at HMS. She was also both a founding member of Physicians for Human Rights and an honorary psychiatrist with the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. After retiring, she was involved in human rights work through Physicians for Human Rights, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and elsewhere. She turned 100 in September 2017 and died in Lincoln, Massachusetts, in March 2021 at the age of 103.
Diana Chapman Walsh was President of Wellesley College from 1993 to 2007. During her tenure, the college revised its curriculum and expanded its programs in global education, internships and service learning, and interdisciplinary teaching and learning. The faculty established new majors in environmental studies, quantitative reasoning, cinema and media studies, neurosciences, and astrophysics. Japanese, Arabic and Korean languages were added to the curriculum as well, and a new department of East Asian Languages and Literatures was launched.
Steven Edward Hyman is Director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is also Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. Hyman was Provost of Harvard University from 2001 to 2011 and before that Director of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 1996 to 2001. Hyman received the 2016 Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health from the National Academy of Medicine for "leadership in furthering understanding and treatment of psychiatric disorders as biological diseases".
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 Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science is a book written by American science author Natalie Angier.
Lydia Villa-Komaroff is a molecular and cellular biologist who has been an academic laboratory scientist, a university administrator, and a business woman. She was the third Mexican-American woman in the United States to receive a doctorate degree in the sciences (1975) and is a co-founding member of The Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS). Her most notable discovery was in 1978 during her post-doctoral research, when she was part of a team that discovered how bacterial cells could be used to generate insulin.
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.
Judith L. Rapoport is an American psychiatrist. She is the chief of the Child Psychiatry Branch at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland.
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.
Evelina G. Fedorenko is a Russian-born American cognitive neuroscientist.
Joshua R Sanes is an American neurobiologist who is known for his contributions to the understanding of synapse development. Throughout his career, Sanes has been the recipient of various awards and honors, including membership to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. His research involves an interdisciplinary approach which focuses mainly on the formation of synapses at the neuromuscular junction by combining the sciences of psychology, chemistry, biology, and engineering to study these circuits and employ molecular and genetic imaging to understand their function. Sanes currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts with his wife, Susan, and their two children.
Tina Young Poussaint is a professor of radiology at the Harvard Medical School and a Neuroradiologist at the Boston Children's Hospital. In 2010 she served as President of the American Society of Pediatric Neuroradiology.
Maribel Rios is a neuroscientist originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico. She received a Bachelor of Arts in neuroscience from Boston University, followed by a Doctor of Philosophy in Cell, Molecular, and Developmental Biology from the Sackler School at Tufts University. Rios continued her studies by attending the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she completed her post-doctoral training in genetics. Following her education, she returned to Tufts where she serves as a professor of neuroscience.
Morgan Hwa-Tze Sheng is a professor of neurobiology and a Core Institute Member at the Broad Institute, where he is a co-director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad Institute. He is a professor of neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences as well as the Menicon Professor of Neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also an associate member at both The Picower Institute for Learning and McGovern Institute for Brain Research. He has served on the editorial boards of Current Opinions in Neurobiology, Neuron, and The Journal of Neuroscience.
