Class
| • | 2. Biological Sciences | [X] |
| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Tibor Jermy | | | Institution: | Plant Protection Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest | | | Year Elected: | 1990 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1917 | | | Death Date: | September 23, 2014 | | | | | | |
Tibor Jermy was distinguished for his work in ecology, especially insect-plant relationships. He was the foremost proponent of the sequential theory of the evolution of insect-plant relationships, emphasizing the asymmetry of the relationship. He postulated that the explosive evolution of the plant kingdom provided the diverse biochemical basis for the radiation of phytophagous insects without significant evolutionary feedback from the insects to the plants. He proposed that the evolution of host specialization is an autonomous process initiated by random heritable changes in the insects' host recognition trait. In the 1950s Dr. Jermy conducted pioneering work on the functioning of ecosystems, and through his fluency in Hungarian, English, German and Russian, he helped unlock a storehouse of literature that had previously been unknown to Western scientists. Born in 1917, Dr. Jermy had a Ph.D. from the University of Budapest. He began his career as an agricultural entomologist at the Plant Protection Institute of the Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture, where he focused on the biology and control of pest insects. He went on to direct the Institute from 1969-79 and became Director Emeritus in 1979. Dr. Jermy had also served as a Ford Foundation fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and as visiting scientist at the Agricultural University of Wageningen in the Netherlands and the USDA Agricultural Research Laboratory in Yakima, WA. Among other learned societies he was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1976) and an Honorary Member of the British Ecological Society (1992). He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1990. His many awards include the Golden Medal of Wrok (1977), the Hungarian State Prize (1983) and the Golden Medal of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Tibor Jermy died September 23, 2014, at the age of 97, in Budapest, Hungary. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. May-Britt Moser | | | Institution: | Centre for Algorithms in the Cortex, Norwegian University of Science and Technology | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1963 | | | | | | |
May-Britt Moser is a Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Centre for Neural Computation at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. She is interested in the neural basis of spatial location and spatial specifically and cognition more generally. Her work, conducted with Edvard Moser as a long-term collaborator, includes the discovery of grid cells in the entorhinal cortex. The discovery of grid cells was succeeded by identification of other functional cell types, including head direction cells, conjunctive cells and border cells and collectively the findings point to the entorhinal cortex as a hub for the brain network that makes us find our way. May-Britt Moser received her initial training at the University of Oslo under the supervision of Dr. Per Andersen. She worked as a post-doc with Richard Morris and John O’Keefe in 1996, before she accepted a faculty position at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She became a Co-Director of the Centre for the Biology of Memory in 2002 and the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience in 2007. In 2012, she was appointed Director of the newly established Centre for Neural Computation. Together with Edvard Moser, she has received a number of awards, including the 2014 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Edvard Moser | | | Institution: | Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Norwegian University of Science and Technology | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1962 | | | | | | |
Edvard Moser is a Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. He is interested in how spatial location and spatial memory are computed in the brain. His work, conducted with May-Britt Moser as a long-term collaborator, includes the discovery of grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, which provides clues to a neural mechanism for the metric of spatial mapping. Subsequent to this discovery the Mosers have identified additional space-representing cell types in the entorhinal cortex and they are beginning to unravel how the neural microcircuit is organized. Edvard Moser received his initial training at the University of Oslo under the supervision of Dr. Per Andersen. He worked as a post-doc with Richard Morris and John O’Keefe in 1996, before he accepted a faculty position at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology the same year. In 2002 he became the Founding Director of the Centre for the Biology of Memory. In 2007 the Centre became a Kavli Institute. Edvard Moser is also Co-Director of the newly established Centre for Neural Computation at the same institution. Together with May-Britt Moser, he has received a number of awards, including the 2014 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology. | |
| 4 | Name: | Sir Rutherford Robertson | | | Institution: | University of Adelaide & Australian National University | | | Year Elected: | 1971 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1913 | | | Death Date: | March 5, 2001 | | | | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Rüdiger Wehner | | | Institution: | University of Zürich | | | Year Elected: | 1993 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1940 | | | | | | |
Rudiger Wehner is among the best scientists in Switzerland in the fields of animal behavior and behavioral ecology as well as in sensory physiology and the neurobiology of vision. A pioneer who unraveled the mechanisms of polarized light vision and celestial navigation in insects (ants and bees), including landmark orientations, he also succeeded in describing in detail the celestial compass and found an intellectual short cut to the insect brain. More recently Dr. Wehner turned his interests to ecological constraints and orientation in extreme desert habitats. Among his main contributions to zoology in general is his very valuable book Zoologie (with W. Gehring) that demonstrates Dr. Wehner's broad knowledge of the field. A former student of Martin Lindauer, Dr. Wehner is currently a professor in the Department of Zoology at the University of Zurich, where he has been a full professor since 1974. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Frankfurt in 1967. | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Semir Zeki | | | Institution: | University College London | | | Year Elected: | 1998 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1940 | | | | | | |
Semir Zeki is professor of neurobiology at University College London. His main research interest is the organization of the primate visual brain. His early studies on the monkey showed that different visual cortical areas are specialized for different tasks of motion, color and form. This led to the influential theory of functional specialization, not localization, in cortical areas. He then used Land's retinex techniques to study the relation of visual cortical neurons to wavelength and color, which led to the idea that color vision is a construction of the brain, not the retina. Recently he has used imaging methods to show that the principle of cortical area specialization is true also in the human brain. Dr. Zeki published his first scientific paper in 1967 and since then has written over 150 papers and three books, including A Vision of the Brain (1993), Inner Vision: an exploration of art and the brain (1999) and La Quête de l'essentiel, which he co-authored with the late French painter Balthus. In 1994, he began to study the neural basis of creativity and the aesthetic appreciation of art. In 2001, he founded the Institute of Neuroesthetics, based mainly in Berkeley, California. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (London), a member of the Academia Europeae and of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. His awards include the Minerva Foundation Prize, the LVMH Science pour l'art Prize, the Rank Prize in opto-electronics, the Electronic Imaging Award, the Koetser Prize and the King Faisal International Prize in Biology. | |
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