Tye and Narayanan Receive Donald B. Lindsley Prize
Researchers recognized for outstanding thesis in behavioral neuroscience
CHICAGO — The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) has awarded the Donald B. Lindsley Prize to Kay M. Tye, PhD, and Nandakumar Narayanan, MD, PhD, during Neuroscience 2009, SfN’s annual meeting and the world’s largest source of emerging news on brain science and health. Supported by The Grass Foundation, the prize, which includes $2,500, recognizes an outstanding PhD thesis in the area of general behavioral neuroscience. The award was established in 1979 in honor of Donald B. Lindsley, PhD, who was one of the early trustees of The Grass Foundation.
“The Society for Neuroscience is proud to support young researchers and believes this recognition is critical for strengthening the field of neuroscience,” said Thomas J. Carew, PhD, president of SfN.
Tye, who completed her doctoral studies at the University of California, San Francisco, focused her thesis research on investigating the neural basis of cue-reward learning, which may also underlie destructive behaviors such as eating disorders and drug addiction. Her studies demonstrate the role of the amygdala in emotional learning and offer physiological evidence of behavioral concepts.
Narayanan completed his thesis research at Yale University, studying cognitive control functions. He identified a role for the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex in suppressing inappropriate brain responses by recording from brain cells during response delays.
The Society for Neuroscience is an organization of more than 39,000 researchers and clinicians who study the brain and nervous system.