2024 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience Awarded to Three SfN Members
Nancy Kanwisher, Doris Tsao, and Winrich Freiwald have been awarded the 2024 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience. The award recognizes their discovery of a specialized system within the brain to recognize faces. Their discoveries have provided basic principles of neural organization and made the starting point for further research on how the processing of visual information is integrated with other cognitive functions.
Kanwisher has been an SfN member for 30 years, served as a JNeurosci editorial board member from 2001–2006, and volunteered on several award selection committees. Tsao has been an SfN member for 24 years, served as a JNeurosci editorial board member from 2010–2015, and was a Presidential Special Lecturer at Neuroscience 2013 and Neuroscience 2022. Freiwald has been an SfN member for 30 years and served on the SfN Program Committee from 2017–2020.
The Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, which includes a $1 million award, will be presented to Kanwisher, Tsao, and Freiwald in Oslo, Norway, September 1.
Nancy Kanwisher was the first to prove that a specific area in the human neocortex is dedicated to recognizing faces, now called the fusiform face area. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) she found individual differences in the location of this area and devised an analysis technique to effectively localize specialized functional regions in the brain. This technique is now widely used and applied to domains beyond the face recognition system.
Elaborating on Kanwisher’s findings, Winrich Freiwald and Doris Tsao studied macaques and mapped out six distinct brain regions, known as the face patch system, including these regions’ functional specialization and how they are connected. By recording the activity of individual brain cells, they revealed how cells in some face patches specialize in faces with particular views.
The Kavli Prize is a partnership among The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, The Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, and The Kavli Foundation. The Kavli Prize honors scientists for breakthroughs in astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience that transform our understanding of the big, the small and the complex.
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The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) is an organization of nearly 35,000 basic scientists and clinicians who study the brain and the nervous system.
