Society for Neuroscience Presents the Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience
CHICAGO — John Rinzel, PhD, will receive the 2019 Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience. The $25,000 prize, supported by the Swartz Foundation, honors an individual whose work has produced a significant cumulative contribution to theoretical models or computational methods in neuroscience or who has made a particularly noteworthy recent advance to the field. It will be presented in Chicago at Neuroscience 2019, the Society for Neuroscience’s (SfN) annual meeting and the world’s largest source of emerging news about brain science and health.
“As an early pioneer in the field of computational neuroscience, Dr. Rinzel is a worthy recipient of the Swartz Prize,” SfN president Diane Lipscombe said. “Dr. Rinzel and his colleagues have given us unique insights into the dynamics of neural systems, by combining elegant computational approaches with physiological data, that have had enduring and broad impact.”
Rinzel, a professor of neural sciences and mathematics at New York University, is a preeminent theoretical neuroscientist. He has made significant contributions to the understanding of brain oscillations and dynamics including the up/down-state alternations of cortical populations during slow wave sleep, as well as aspects of behavior such as a perceptual bistability, including binocular rivalry. Rinzel uses important experimental results of cellular and network neuroscience to guide his modeling, while keeping the result simple and elegant, and keeps up an active dialogue with experimentalists. His data-guided models follow the style of applied mathematics where explaining the application is the primary goal of theory.
The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) is an organization of nearly 36,000 basic scientists and clinicians who study the brain and the nervous system.
