The Brain Prize#
The Brain Prize recognises highly original and influential advances in any area of neuroscience, including fundamental research on molecular, cellular, physiological and pharmacological mechanisms, studies of behaviour and cognition, advances in technology for monitoring the nervous system, translational research on the application of basic knowledge to clinical and other problems of humankind, and clinical research on the causes, treatment and prevention of neurological and psychiatric disorders.
If several researchers have contributed significantly to this achievement, more than one individual may be nominated. Nominees can be of any nationality, but the research for which they are nominated must have been in Europe or in collaboration with researchers in Europe.
More information at The Brain Prize website
Academia Europaea Brain Prize Awardees#
- 2023: Erin Schuman (together with Christine Holt and Michael E. Greenberg) "for having revolutionized our understanding of how neurons regulate the thousands of different proteins – the building blocks of life, that are needed to support brain development, plasticity and maintenance"
- 2022: Ole Kiehn and Silvia Arber (together with Martyn Goulding) "for having revolutionized our understanding of the neuronal cell types and circuits underlying movement"
- 2021: Peter Goadsby (together with Jes Olesen, Michael A. Moskowitz and Lars Edvinsson) "for their groundbreaking work on the causes and treatment of migraine"
- 2020: Sir Adrian Bird (together with Huda Zoghbi) "for their fundamental and pioneering work on Rett syndrome"
- 2018: John Hardy, Christian Haass, Michel Goedert and Bart De Strooper "for their groundbreaking research on the genetic and molecular basis of Alzheimer’s disease, with far-reaching implications for the development of new therapeutic interventions as well as for the understanding of other neurodegenerative diseases of the brain"
- 2017: Peter Dayan and Wolfram Schultz (together with Ray Dolan) "for their multidisciplinary analysis of brain mechanisms that link learning to reward, which has far-reaching implications for the understanding of human behaviour, including disorders of decision-making in conditions such as gambling, drug addiction, compulsive behaviour and schizophrenia"
- 2016: Timothy Bliss and Graham Collingridge, (together with Richard Morris) "for research on memory mechanisms"
- 2015: Arthur Konnerth (together with Winfried Denk, Karel Svoboda and David W. Tank) "for invention, refinement and use of two-photon microscopy to provide detailed, dynamic images of activity in individual nerve cells, dendrites and synapses, thereby transforming the study of development, plasticity and functional circuitry of the brain"
- 2014: Giacomo Rizzolatti, Stanislas Dehaene (together with Trevor W. Robbins) "for their pioneering research on higher brain mechanisms underpinning such complex human functions as literacy, numeracy, motivated behaviour and social cognition, and for their efforts to understand cognitive and behavioural disorders"
- 2013: Gero Miesenböck (together with Ernst Bamberg, Edward Boyden, Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel) "for their invention and refinement of optogenetics. This revolutionary technique allows genetically specified populations of neurons to be turned on or off with light, offering not only the ability to elucidate the characteristics of normal and abnormal neural circuitry but also new approaches to treatment of brain disorders"
- 2012: Christine Petit (together with Karen Steel) "for their unique, world-leading contributions to our understanding of the genetic regulation of the development and functioning of the ear, and for elucidating the causes of many of the hundreds of inherited forms of deafness"
- 2011: Péter Somogyi, Tamás Freund and György Buzsáki "for their wide-ranging, technically and conceptually brilliant research on the functional organization of neuronal circuits in the cerebral cortex, especially in the hippocampus, a region that is crucial for certain forms of memory"
