| The Brain Prize | |
| Awarded For: | The Brain Prize is awarded to one or more scientists who have distinguished themselves by an outstanding contribution to neuroscience and who are still active in research. The Prize is global. |
| Reward: | DKK 10 million |
| Presenter: | A Royal Highness and the Chairman of the board |
| Country: | Denmark |
| Year: | 2011 |
The Brain Prize,[1] formerly known as The Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Prize, is an international scientific award honouring "one or more scientists who have distinguished themselves by an outstanding contribution to neuroscience and who are still active in research".[2] Founded in 2011 by the Lundbeck Foundation, the prize is associated with a DKK 10 million award to the nominees, the world’s largest brain research prize.[3]
Nominees can be of any nationality. Prize winners are expected to interact with Danish brain researchers e.g. through lectures, master classes, seminars, exchange programmes for researchers or other activities agreed with and financially supported by the Lundbeck Foundation.[4]
The Brain Prize[5] was established by the Lundbeck Foundation in 2010 as a European prize and was awarded for the first time in 2011. Today the Prize is global.
As of 2019, the selection committee for the prize consisted of:[6]
| Year | Laureates | Country | Citation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | Péter Somogyi | / | ”For their wide-ranging, technically and conceptually brilliant research on the functional organization of neuronal circuits in the cerebral cortex, especially in the hippo¬campus, a region that is crucial for certain forms of memory"[7] |
| Tamás Freund | |||
| György Buzsáki | / | ||
| 2012 | Christine Petit | "For their unique, world-leading contributions to our understanding of the genetic regulation of the development and functioning of the ear, and for elucidating the causes of many of the hundreds of inherited forms of deafness" | |
| Karen Steel | |||
| 2013 | Ernst Bamberg | "For their invention and refinement of optogenetics. This revolutionary technique allows genetically specified populations of neurons to be turned on or off with light, offering not only the ability to elucidate the characteristics of normal and abnormal neural circuitry but also new approaches to treatment of brain disorders" | |
| Edward Boyden | |||
| Karl Deisseroth | |||
| Peter Hegemann | |||
| Gero Miesenböck | |||
| Georg Nagel | |||
| 2014 | Giacomo Rizzolatti | "For their pioneering research on higher brain mechanisms underpinning such complex human functions as literacy, numeracy, motivated behaviour and social cognition, and for their efforts to understand cognitive and behavioural disorders" | |
| Stanislas Dehaene | |||
| 2015 | Winfried Denk | "For invention, refinement and use of two-photon microscopy to provide detailed, dynamic images of activity in individual nerve cells, dendrites and synapses, thereby transforming the study of development, plasticity and functional circuitry of the brain" | |
| Arthur Konnerth | |||
| Karel Svoboda | |||
| 2016 | Timothy Bliss | "For their ground-breaking research on the cellular and molecular basis of Long-Term Potentiation and the demonstration that this form of synaptic plasticity underpins spatial memory and learning" | |
| Graham Collingridge | |||
| Richard G. Morris | |||
| 2017 | Wolfram Schultz | "For their multidisciplinary analysis of brain mechanisms that link learning to reward, which has far-reaching implications for the understanding of human behaviour, including disorders of decision-making in conditions such as gambling, drug addiction, compulsive behaviour and schizophrenia" | |
| Peter Dayan | |||
| Ray Dolan | |||
| 2018 | Bart De Strooper | "For their groundbreaking research on the genetic and molecular basis of Alzheimer’s disease, with far-reaching implications for the development of new therapeutic interventions as well as for the understanding of other neurodegenerative diseases of the brain'" | |
| Michel Goedert | |||
| Christian Haass | |||
| John Hardy | |||
| 2019 | Marie-Germaine Bousser | "for more than 30 years spent describing, understanding and diagnosing the most common inherited form of stroke, CADASIL" | |
| Hugues Chabriat | |||
| Anne Joutel | |||
| Elisabeth Tournier-Lasserve | |||
| 2020 | Sir Adrian Bird | "for their fundamental and pioneering work on Rett syndrome." | |
| Huda Zoghbi | / | ||
| 2021 | Lars Edvinsson | "for their groundbreaking work on the causes and treatment of migraine" | |
| Peter Goadsby | / | ||
| Michael A. Moskowitz | |||
| Jes Olesen | |||
| 2022 | Silvia Arber | "for having revolutionized our understanding of the neuronal cell types and circuits underlying movement."[8] | |
| Ole Kiehn | |||
| Martyn Goulding | / | ||
| 2023 | Michael E. Greenberg | "for having revolutionized our understanding of how neurons regulate the thousands of different proteins – the building blocks of life, that are needed to support brain development, plasticity and maintenance."[9] | |
| Christine Holt | |||
| Erin Schuman | |||
| 2024 | Larry Abbott | "to have made pioneering contributions to the field of computational and theoretical neuroscience and have made seminal contributions to our understanding of the principles that govern the brain’s structure, dynamics and the emergence of cognition and behaviour."[10] | |
| Terrence Sejnowski | |||
| Haim Sompolinsky |