The McGovern Institute announced today that the winner of the 2019 Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience is Rick Huganir, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience and Psychological and Brain Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Huganir is being recognized for his role in understanding the molecular and biochemical underpinnings of “synaptic […]
Ila Fiete, an associate professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT recently joined the McGovern Institute as an associate investigator. Fiete is working to understand the circuits that underlie short-term memory, integration, and inference in the brain. Think about the simple act of visiting a new town and getting to know […]
New work from researchers at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT peers under the hood of an automated fake-news detection system, revealing how machine-learning models catch subtle but consistent differences in the language of factual and false stories. The research also underscores how fake-news detectors should undergo more rigorous testing to be effective […]
You might have played ‘join the dots’, a puzzle where numbers guide you to draw until a complete picture emerges. But imagine a complex underlying image with no numbers to guide the sequence of joining. This is a problem that challenges scientists who work with large amounts of neural data. Sometimes they can align data […]
Below are a few questions that our readers have submitted Do we only use 10% of our brain? Why do I talk with my hands? What is CRISPR? Yanny or Laurel? Can the brain recover after paralysis? Does our ability to learn new things stop at a certain age? How are memories formed? Does playing […]
Towards a deeper understanding of autism For MIT alumnus Hock Tan ’75 SM ’75 and Lisa Yang, improving the lives of individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has been a long-standing passion. Tan and Yang are parents of three adult children, two of whom are on the autism spectrum, and they feel passionately that the […]
The founding of the McGovern Institute was for us the culmination of a shared lifelong fascination with the human brain. The creation of the McGovern Institute was made possible by the vision and generosity of Patrick J. McGovern ’59 and Lore Harp McGovern, whose commitment remains one of the largest philanthropic gifts in the history […]