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H. Robert Horvitz has devoted much of his career to studying the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. Only 1 mm long and containing fewer than 1000 cells, C. elegans has proved to be remarkably informative for studying many biological problems, including the genetic control of development and behavior and the mechanisms that underlie neurodegenerative disease.

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 […]

Dr. Roger Nicoll of the University of California, San Francisco delivered the 2012 Scolnick Prize lecture, entitled “Deconstructing and reconstructing an excitatory synapse,” at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT on Thursday April 19. 2012.

Nancy Kanwisher describes what McGovern researchers are doing to understand the brain basis of autism.

The inaugural Sharp Lecture was given on March 1, 2012 by Okihide Hikosaka of the NIH, a leading expert on brain mechanisms of motivation and learning.

Michale Fee, an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, studies birdsong in order to understand how the brain learns and generates complex sequences of behavior.

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a noninvasive technique for measuring neuronal activity in the human brain. Electrical currents flowing through neurons generate weak magnetic fields that can be recorded at the surface of the head using very sensitive magnetic detectors known as superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs). MEG is a purely passive method that relies on detection […]