| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Ann M. Graybiel | | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
Ann Martin Graybiel and coworkers pioneered understanding of the basal ganglia, brain structures related to movement and emotion that are disordered in neurologic and neuropsychiatric disorders. Relatively little was known about the neurobiology of these structures until Graybiel and her students discovered the structural architecture of the striatum, a physical design now known to underpin the organization of genes and neurotransmitters, including dopamine, linked to Parkinson’s disease. By training animals to learn habits, she and her group discovered neural activity templates for habit learning in the striatum and found that distinct activity patterns uniquely characterize different motor and emotion-related regions. Graybiel and students now are finding that these templates can be modified by circuit intervention, opening the possibility of new therapeutic approaches to disorders of movement and emotion. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Eric Knudsen | | | Institution: | Stanford University School of Medicine | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | | | | |
Dr. Knudsen received his PhD from the University of California, San Diego in 1976. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology in 1979. He joined the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University as an assistant professor in 1979, became a full professor in 1988, and served as Chair of the Department from 2000-2005. He is currently the Sewall Professor of Neurobiology, Emeritus at Stanford University School of Medicine. His research has focused on how the central nervous system processes information, how it learns from experience, and how it selects information for attention and decision-making. Dr. Knudsen has received a number of honors and awards, including election to the National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the Society’s Karl Spencer Lashley Award in 2008 "for his comprehensive study of visual and auditory perception in the owl and for his elucidation of how the auditory map is calibrated by the visual system during development." He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2016. | |
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