Shepherd and Colgin Receive the Gruber International Research Award in Neuroscience
SAN DIEGO — The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) awarded The Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award in Neuroscience to Jason Shepherd, PhD, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Laura Colgin, PhD, of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology during Neuroscience 2010, SfN’s annual meeting and the world’s largest source of emerging news on brain science and health. The award recognizes two promising young scientists for their outstanding research and educational pursuit in an international setting. It is supported by The Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation and includes $25,000 for each recipient.
“We applaud the accomplishments of these young scientists and expect to see exciting contributions from them in the years to come,” said Michael E. Goldberg, MD, president of SfN.
Shepherd has made important contributions to understanding the mechanisms underlying long-term synaptic plasticity. He showed the immediate early gene Arc is important in vesicular trafficking in brain cells, which is important for neural communication. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is investigating the role of Arc in the physiology of the visual system. He is originally from New Zealand and completed his PhD studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Colgin has been instrumental in determining how nerve cells use gamma waves to route information through the hippocampus, which is important in learning and memory. During her time as a postdoctoral fellow at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Colgin demonstrated that nerve cells in the hippocampus oscillate between fast and slow gamma waves. Her research has implications for understanding how the brain encodes and retrieves memories, as well as how information flows throughout the brain. Colgin earned her PhD from the University of California, Irvine.
The Society for Neuroscience is an organization of more than 40,000 researchers and clinicians who study the brain and nervous system.
