| 1 | Name: | Dr. Eric R. Kandel | |
| Institution: | Columbia University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute | ||
| Year Elected: | 1984 | ||
| Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1929 | ||
Eric Kandel received his M.D. from New York University School of Medicine in 1956. He was a resident in psychiatry and staff psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, 1960-65, before turning his attention to neurobiology. In 1965 he returned to New York University, serving as associate professor in the department of physiology and psychiatry. He moved to Columbia University in 1974 as professor in the departments of physiology and psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. He also directed the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, 1974-83, and was appointed University Professor in 1983. He has also been professor in the departments of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Columbia and senior investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Renowned for his pathbreaking contributions to our knowledge of mind, Eric Kandel shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. Through studies of invertebrates such as the giant marine snail, Aplysia, he has succeeded in reframing memory and other mental processes as series of molecular events determined by the physicochemical qualities of cellular life. Well-known for his contributions to textbooks such as Principles of Neural Science, Dr. Kandel is the author of In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (2006) and The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconsccious in Art, Mind and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present (2012). The recipient of the Karl Spencer Lashley Prize in Neurobiology (1981) and the Wolf Prize in Biology and Medicine (1999), Eric Kandel is a member of the National Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences (1974), and the Royal Society. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1984. In 2006 Dr. Kandel was awarded the American Philosophical Society's Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Sciences. The citation read "in recognition of his leadership in the study at the cellular and molecular levels of the biology of the mental processes, and especially the character of learning and memory. The American Philosophical Society salutes Eric Kandel for advancing the study of learning and memory - long the provinces of philosophy and psychology - into the "empirical language of biology." Kandel is the author of The Disordered Mind: what Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves (2018). | |||