SfN members Silvia Arber, Ole Kiehn, and Martyn Goulding have been awarded the 2022 Brain Prize for mapping the neuronal cell types and circuits in the brain and spinal cord that control movement. Their collective work in fundamental neuroscience highlights the need and paves the way for cell type-specific diagnostics and interventions in disorders of movement.
Silvia Arber is a professor at the Biozentrum, University of Basel and the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland. Ole Kiehn is a professor at the Department of Neuroscience,
University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. Martyn Goulding is a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, La Jolla, USA.
The Brain Prize is awarded annually by the Lundbeck Foundation and is worth DKK 10 million (approximately £1.1 million, $1.5 million, €1.3 million). The award will be presented at a ceremony in Copenhagen on May 25, 2022 – presided over by His Royal Highness, The Crown Prince of Denmark.
“The ability to move is fundamental,” says University of Edinburgh Professor Richard Morris, chair of the Brain Prize Selection Committee in a press release. “From the first steps of a baby through to the balance and agility required in riding a bicycle, movement is something we do all the time. Understanding how the brain and spinal cord control movement is a huge scientific challenge. Elegant experimental work by the three recipients has helped uncover how intentions to move are transmitted through the intricate firing of brainstem circuits all the way down to the specific pattern-generating cells of the spinal cord whose activity controls the muscles of the body including the fingers, arms and legs.”
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The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) is an organization of nearly 36,000 basic scientists and clinicians who study the brain and the nervous system