Society for Neuroscience 2025 Outstanding Career and Research Achievements

Society for Neuroscience 2025 Outstanding Career and Research Achievements

SAN DIEGO - The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) will honor five leading researchers whose impactful work has transformed neuroscience - including the understanding of memory, synapse formation, social reinforcement in addiction, and how neurons make sense of input noise - with this year's Outstanding Career and Research Achievement Awards. The awards will be presented during SfN's annual meeting.

"The Society is honored to recognize this year's awardees, whose pioneering work has shaped the field and led to paradigm shifts in our understanding of memory, addiction, and theoretical neuroscience," said SfN President John H. Morrison. "The curiosity, creativity, and drive of this group of neuroscientists led them to answer questions that had been confounding the field, discover the precise details of synapse development, and recognize important relationships that had been overlooked in addiction, leading to deeper insights into the brain and providing hope for successful therapeutics to come."

Ralph W. Gerard Prize in Neuroscience: Joshua Sanes

The Ralph W. Gerard Prize in Neuroscience - the highest recognition conferred by SfN - recognizes an outstanding scientist who has made significant contributions to neuroscience throughout his or her career. The prize is named for Ralph W. Gerard, MD, PhD, a revered neuroscientist who was instrumental in establishing the Society for Neuroscience and served as its honorary president. The awardees receive a $30,000 prize in addition to complimentary registration and travel to SfN's annual meeting.

Joshua Sanes, PhD, the Jeff C. Tarr Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, emeritus, and founding director of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University, is a trailblazing researcher whose contributions have shaped the field of neural development. In the first half of his career, Sanes elucidated the mechanisms of synapse formation at the neuromuscular junction, demonstrating how a motor nerve finds its target and establishes contact, offering critical insights into the extrinsic and intrinsic factors that regulate synaptic development. Later in his career, Sanes focused on the visual system to understand how neurons discriminate among the vast number of potential synaptic targets they encounter in the developing brain. He revealed a rich diversity of cell types in the retina, uncovered properties of the various types of cells, elucidated the molecular logic underlying mosaic spacing of neurons, identified the molecules that guide dendrites and axons to their appropriate laminar positions in the retina, and showed how neuronal processes achieve self-avoidance. His groundbreaking research has made a profound impact on neuroscience.

Jacob P. Waletzky Award: Marco Venniro

The Jacob P. Waletzky Award recognizes an early career scientist (within 15 years of his or her PhD or MD degree) whose independent research has led to significant conceptual and empirical contributions to the understanding of drug addiction and who plans to continue to make significant contributions to addiction research and treatment. The award is endowed by the Waletzky Award Prize Fund and the Waletzky family. The recipient receives a $30,000 prize and complimentary registration and travel to SfN's annual meeting.

Marco Venniro, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, is an exceptional scientist whose innovative work has already shaped the addiction field and opened new avenues for research into social behavior and mental health. Venniro helped drive a paradigm shift in the conceptual understanding of addiction, which is already transforming the neuroscience of addictive disorders. He created an innovative first operant model to assess the competition between drug and social reinforcement in rats, a groundbreaking approach that demonstrated that social interaction can suppress drug self-administration and craving. This work revealed that drug reinforcement cannot be fully understood in isolation but must be examined in the context of real-life choices, where individuals opt for drugs over other meaningful rewards. Venniro also identified a specific cell type in the central amygdala that is critical for social interactions to prevent relapse. Venniro's lab has recently developed a two-rat model of reciprocal social administration, and his current research continues to demonstrate the role of operant social reward in animal models of addiction, as well as inspire other researchers to consider this previously overlooked role of social relationships.

Julius Axelrod Prize: Gregory Quirk

The Julius Axelrod Prize honors a scientist with distinguished achievements in the broad field of neuropharmacology or a related area and who shows exemplary efforts in mentoring early career scientists. The award, endowed by the Eli Lilly and Company Foundation, includes a $30,000 prize in addition to complimentary registration and travel to SfN's annual meeting. The recipient is also invited to give the keynote address at a symposium at the National Institute of Mental Health in the spring of 2026.

Gregory Quirk, PhD, a supervising scientist at the University of the Philippines Manila, is a highly influential behavioral neuroscientist who has made seminal contributions to the understanding of fear and extinction learning. Quirk's research provided the key evidence that fear extinction is new learning that depends on plasticity in prefrontal-amygdala circuits. This helped settle a debate about the role of the medial prefrontal cortex in fear regulation, demonstrating that the prelimbic and infralimbic subregions have opposing roles in fear expression and fear extinction, respectively. He also helped elucidate the roles of brain-derived neurotrophic factor and NMDA-dependent plasticity in fear extinction learning, and discovered separate pathways for the retrieval of short-term and long-term fear memories. Translation of his work in rodents has profoundly influenced human brain imaging of anxiety disorders such as PTSD and OCD. In addition to his influential research, Quirk has made a career-long commitment to promoting neuroscience in developing countries and increasing opportunities for students from a range of backgrounds, as indicated by his 25 years in Puerto Rico - where he launched the careers of more than 100 scientist trainees - and his current position facilitating the first neuroscience research program in the Philippines.

Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience: Alexandre Pouget

The Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience is given to an individual whose activities have produced a significant cumulative contribution to theoretical models or computational methods in neuroscience or who has made a particularly noteworthy recent advance in theoretical or computational neuroscience. The prize is endowed by the Swartz Foundation and the recipient receives a $30,000 award and complimentary registration and travel to SfN's annual meeting.

Alexandre Pouget, PhD, a professor in the Department of Basic Neuroscience at the University of Geneva, is an influential and highly productive computational neuroscientist who has had an enormous impact on both theoretical and experimental neuroscience aimed at understanding perception, decision-making, and reasoning. He was among the first to make specific predictions about how Bayesian inference might be implemented in the brain, arguing that brain functions can be understood and described in the language of probability theory and showing how neurons compute those probabilities. Pouget's first key contribution was to realize that "noise" in neural responses is not a nuisance that could be averaged away, but a key part of the signal required for optimal inference about the external world. This offered an important solution to the question of how the brain represents, propagates, and processes the uncertainty that pervades neural computations. Next, he designed a testable theory and careful investigations of Bayesian principles in action, including in multisensory integration, decision-making, visual attention, perceptual learning, olfaction, and synaptic learning. Pouget received the 2016 Carnegie Prize in Brain and Mind Sciences. In addition to advancing the field through his scientific discoveries, Pouget also co-founded the Computational and Systems Neuroscience meeting (COSYNE) and co-created the International Brain Laboratory. He is currently focusing his research on the neural basis of compositionality, a cornerstone of general intelligence.

Peter Seeburg Integrative Neuroscience Prize: Sheena Josselyn

The Peter Seeburg Integrative Neuroscience Prize, endowed by the Schaller-Nikolich Foundation, honors original and groundbreaking achievements in neuroscience. Named after Peter H. Seeburg, PhD, a German neuroscientist and pioneer in molecular neurobiology, the prize recognizes outstanding advances in the understanding of executive brain functions and cognitive processes. The prize honors researchers who have successfully embedded molecular and cellular events in a circuit and systems context to make significant advances in explaining cognitive and behavioral processes such as emotion, learning, memory, attention, and decision-making. The recipient receives a $100,000 prize and complimentary registration and travel to SfN's annual meeting.

Sheena Josselyn, PhD, a senior scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and a professor in the departments of psychology and physiology at the University of Toronto, is an innovative, creative scientist who has had a profound impact on the understanding of memory. Her work has bridged the gap between molecular mechanisms and cognitive functions, with far-reaching implications for many brain disorders. Although engrams -ensembles of neurons that support a specific memory - had been theorized for over a century, the search for an engram or physical memory trace had been futile until Josselyn's work. She was among the first to show that engrams exist in the brains of rodents and the first to identify the molecular and circuit mechanisms underlying how neurons are recruited to an engram. She also showed how stress produces a larger engram and generalized fear memory; how neuronal allocation to an engram ensemble links related memories; and how higher order interactions between neurons in an engram ensemble are crucial for memory retrieval but are disrupted in mouse models of Alzheimer's disease. Overall, her contributions defined an engram as a basic unit of information storage, transforming memory research.

SfN Service Award: Floyd Bloom

In recognition of nearly 40 years of volunteer service to SfN, including as SfN president from 1976 to 1977, SfN is pleased to recognize Floyd Bloom, MD, with a special posthumous SfN Service Award. "SfN would not be the organization it is today if it wasn't for the decades-long commitment of volunteers like Floyd Bloom," said John H. Morrison, SfN president. "His legacy as a leader and mentor will be carried on by all the lives he touched, including my own."

Bloom earned his MD at Washington University School of Medicine. His long career brought him to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Yale University, the Salk Institute, and the Scripps Research Institute. Bloom was among the first to study neurotransmitter systems at anatomical, physiological, and pharmacological levels. He was one of the first neurobiologists to use modern molecular biological techniques to identify, functionally characterize, and map brain-specific genes. Recognizing the value of computers in neuroscience, he pioneered their application to neuroanatomic investigations and the development of neuroanatomic databases.

Bloom's first role with SfN was as Council secretary in 1972, followed by serving as SfN president from 1976-1977. He contributed to a number of committees, including the Finance, Investment, Program, Publications, Government and Public Affairs, and Long-Range Planning committees. Beyond his volunteer leadership at the Society, Bloom served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2003 and editor-in-chief of Science magazine from 1995 to 2000. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Philosophical Society, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The Service Award will be presented to Jody Corey-Bloom, MD, PhD, Bloom's wife of 45 years.

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The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) is an organization of nearly 30,000 basic scientists and clinicians who study the brain and the nervous system.