Institute News: Awards & Honors

Ed Boyden to share prestigious brain prize

Anne Trafton |

Ed Boyden, a faculty member in the MIT Media Lab and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, was today named a recipient of the 2013 Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Prize. The 1 million Euro prize is awarded for the development of optogenetics, a technology that makes it possible to control brain activity using light.

The Brain Prize is awarded annually by the Denmark-based Lundbeck Foundation for outstanding contributions to European neuroscience. Boyden is recognized for work done in collaboration with Karl Deisseroth at Stanford University, which builds on earlier discoveries by four European researchers: Ernst Bamberg, Georg Nagel and Peter Hegemann in Germany, and Gero Miesenböck, now in Oxford, U.K. The prize will be shared equally between all six researchers.

The idea of using light to control brain activity was suggested by Francis Crick in 1999, and Miesenbock performed a proof of concept demonstration in 2002, showing that light-sensitive proteins obtained from the eyes of fruit-flies could be used to activate mammalian neurons. A further breakthrough was enabled by the discovery of channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2), a light-activated ion channel from a common pond algal species that had been characterized by Hegemann in Martinsried and by Nagel and Bamberg in Frankfurt.

The application of ChR2 to neuroscience was pioneered by Boyden and Deisseroth at Stanford University, where Deisseroth is now a faculty member. In a collaboration that began when Boyden was a graduate student and Deisseroth a postdoctoral fellow, they obtained the ChR2 gene from Nagel and Bamberg, expressed it in cultured neurons, and pulsed the dish with blue light to see whether it could trigger neural activity. The first experiment was performed in August 2004, and it worked first time; as Boyden recounted in a recent historical article, “serendipity had struck — the molecule was good enough in its wild-type form to be used in neurons right away.”

They reported this result in 2005, in a landmark paper in Nature Neuroscience that has now been cited more than 600 times. Their method, later dubbed “optogenetics,” is now used by hundreds of labs worldwide and is also being explored for a wide range of potential therapeutic applications. In announcing the Brain Prize, the chairman of the selection committee, Professor Colin Blakemore, described optogenetics as “arguably the most important technical advance in neuroscience in the past 40 years.”

Boyden joined the MIT faculty in 2006, where he is now the Benesse Career Development Professor in the Media Lab, with joint appointments at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and in the Departments of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences. His contributions have been recognized by numerous awards and honors, including the inaugural AF Harvey Prize and the 2011 Perl/UNC prize (shared with Karl Deisseroth and with Feng Zhang, also at MIT). He continues to develop novel optogenetic tools, along with many other technologies for understanding and manipulating neural circuits within the living brain.

Boyden’s work was supported by the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation, the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, Jerry and Marge Burnett, DARPA and the Department of Defense, Google, Harvard/MIT Joint Grants Program in Basic Neuroscience, Human Frontiers Science Program, IET A. F. Harvey Prize, MIT McGovern Institute and MIT Media Lab, NARSAD, New York Stem Cell Foundation-Robertson Investigator Award, NIH, NSF, Paul Allen Distinguished Investigator in Neuroscience Award, Shelly Razin, SkTech, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Society for Neuroscience Research Award for Innovation in Neuroscience (RAIN), and the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation.

Martha Constantine-Paton wins lifetime achievement award

Anne Trafton |

Constantine-Paton, a leading figure in the field of developmental neuroscience, has been awarded the Society for Neuroscience’s Mika Salpeter Lifetime Achievement Award.

The award recognizes individuals with outstanding career achievements in neuroscience who have also actively promoted the professional advancement of women in neuroscience. Constantine-Paton will be recognized for her achievements during the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting this October.

Over the past 30 years, Constantine-Paton has established a reputation as a leading figure in the field of developmental neuroscience. In particular, her pioneering work on NMDA receptor-dependent plasticity laid the groundwork for our current understanding of how the brain becomes correctly wired in response to activity and experience.

She has also mentored many students and postdocs, among them several prominent women scientists, and she is very active in promoting the career development of her junior colleagues.

“Martha’s research contributions have been extremely influential within her field, and her influence has also been felt through her exemplary record of mentoring and service,” says McGovern Institute director Robert Desimone. “Martha’s career indeed represents a lifetime of achievement and I cannot imagine a more deserving recipient for this honor.”

Ann Graybiel wins Kavli Prize in Neuroscience

Anne Trafton |

Three MIT researchers including Ann Graybiel  are among seven pioneering scientists worldwide named today as this year’s recipients of the Kavli Prizes.

These prizes recognize scientists for their seminal advances in astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience, and include a cash award of $1 million in each field. This year’s laureates were selected for their fundamental contributions to our understanding of the outer solar system; the differences in material properties at the nanoscale and at larger scales; and how the brain receives and responds to sensations such as sight, sound and touch.

The Kavli Prizes, awarded biennially since 2008, are a partnership between the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Kavli Foundation and the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. Today’s announcement was made by Nils Christian Stenseth, president of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and transmitted live at the opening event of the World Science Festival in New York.

King Harald of Norway will present the Kavli Prizes to the laureates at an award ceremony in Oslo on Sept. 4. The ceremony will be hosted by Ã…se Kleveland, former minister of culture for Norway, and Alan Alda, the actor, director, writer and longtime supporter of science.

The Kavli Prize in Astrophysics

The 2012 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics is shared by Jane X. Luu, a technical staff member at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, along with David C. Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles and Michael E. Brown of the California Institute of Technology. They received the prize “for discovering and characterizing the Kuiper Belt and its largest members, work that led to a major advance in the understanding of the history of our planetary system.”

In 1992, Luu and Jewitt spotted the first known object in the Kuiper Belt, a region beyond Neptune’s orbit that is more than 30 times Earth’s distance from the sun. Since then, they and others have identified more than 1,000 Kuiper Belt objects. Astronomers are particularly interested in these objects because their composition may resemble the primordial material that coalesced around the sun during the formation of our solar system.

Brown followed in Luu and Jewitt’s footsteps by searching the Kuiper Belt for planet-sized bodies. In 2005, he found Eris, an object about the same size as Pluto but with 27 percent more mass. As a result, astronomers revisited the definition of planets; Pluto was subsequently relegated to “dwarf planet” status.

The Kavli Prize in Nanoscience

The 2012 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience is given to Mildred S. Dresselhaus, Institute Professor Emerita of Physics and Computer Science and Engineering at MIT, “for her pioneering contributions to the study of phonons, electron-phonon interactions, and thermal transport in nanostructures.”

Over five decades, Dresselhaus has made multiple advances explaining how the nanoscale properties of materials can vary from those of the same materials at larger dimensions. Her early work on carbon fibers and on compounds made up of different chemical species sandwiched between graphite layers — known as graphite intercalation compounds — laid the groundwork for later discoveries concerning buckyballs, carbon nanotubes and graphene.

The Kavli Prize in Neuroscience

The Kavli Prize in Neuroscience is shared by Ann M. Graybiel, Institute Professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, along with Cornelia Isabella Bargmann of Rockefeller University and Winfried Denk of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research. They received the prize “for elucidating basic neuronal mechanisms underlying perception and decision.”

Graybiel, of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, has identified and traced neural loops connecting the outer layer of the brain to a region called the striatum, revealing that these form the basis for linking sensory cues to actions involved in habitual behaviors. Her work has provided a deeper understanding of human ability to make or break habits, and of what goes wrong in disorders involving movement and repetitive behaviors.

Bargmann has used nematode worms to provide insights into the molecular controls of animal behavior, yielding important advances including the discovery of the first evidence that odor response is governed by neurons; of the intracellular signaling pathways between odorant receptors and sensory neurons; and of specific neurons, receptors and neurotransmitters involved in behavior adaption following experience.

Two techniques developed by Denk have answered major questions about how information is transmitted from the eye to the brain: His invention of two-photon laser scanning fluorescence microscopy allowed imaging of living tissue at greater depths and with less unwanted background fluorescence, and his development of serial block-face electron microscopy allowed detailed 3-D imaging of minute structures within tissue.

About the Kavli Prizes

Kavli Prize recipients are chosen biennially by committees of distinguished international scientists recommended by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Sciences, the Max Planck Society, the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society. The recommendations of these prize committees are then confirmed by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

The Kavli Prizes were initiated by and named after Fred Kavli, founder and chairman of the Kavli Foundation, which is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity, promoting public understanding of scientific research, and supporting scientists and their work.

For more detailed information on each of the prizes including a video of the 2012 award ceremony, see the Kavli Prize website.