Society for Neuroscience 2024 Early Career Scientists’ Achievements and Research Awards
CHICAGO – The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) will honor nine early career researchers whose work will be presented during Neuroscience 2024, SfN's annual meeting.
“Early career researchers are often the ones who bring fresh ideas and perspectives to the field,” said SfN President Marina Picciotto. “These awardees and their novel approaches to microscopy, machine learning, circuits and behavior will drive neuroscience forward for many years to come” Picciotto said.
Jennifer N. Bourne Prize in Brain Ultrastructure: Yuuta Imoto
The Jennifer N. Bourne Prize in Brain Ultrastructure recognizes early career neuroscientists for outstanding work that advances our understanding of brain structure and function at the nanometer scale. Named for Jennifer N. Bourne, an electron microscopist and core facility director who studied the structural plasticity of synapses, the award honors brain ultrastructure researchers who are within their first five years of academic appointments. The award is funded by Kristen M. Harris and includes a $5,000 prize and travel to SfN’s annual meeting.
This year’s Bourne Prize recipient is Yuuta Imoto, PhD, assistant member in the Department of Developmental Neurobiology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Imoto’s research approach integrates synaptic vesicle fusion and vesicle recycling to dissect how individual molecular components contribute to the dynamic structural changes that underlie synaptic transmission. Imoto is a rising leader in the field of ultrastructure imagery who combines meticulous ultrastructural analysis of synapses with time-resolved electron microscopy and super-resolution microscopy images. These dynamic images enable a deeper exploration of membrane dynamics at millisecond time scale and the protein localization at nanometer level within synapses. By combining these cutting-edge microscopy methods with structural biology, genetic engineering, and biochemistry, Imoto has uncovered proteins and molecular mechanisms responsible for the fastest synaptic vesicle recycling pathway, a process that has remained an unresolved mystery in the field for decades. Ultimately, Imoto’s contributions to understanding these complex synaptic processes can inform research on neurological disorders caused by alterations in neurotransmitter levels and lead to advancements in the development of treatments for medical conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, depression, and Alzheimer’s disease . Furthermore, his research will uncover how synaptic structure and function in modern animals were established during evolution, providing insights into the fundamental mechanisms that have shaped neural systems over time.
Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience:
Marissa Applegate and Tom Hindmarsh Sten
Endowed by The Grass Foundation, the Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience recognizes an outstanding PhD thesis in the area of general behavioral neuroscience. The award was established in 1979 in honor of Donald B. Lindsley, an early trustee of the Grass Foundation. The award includes a $5,000 prize shared by the recipients and recipients’ travel to the SfN annual meeting.
This year’s awardees are Marissa Applegate, PhD, and Tom Hindmarsh Sten, PhD, whose doctoral research focused on how animal brains respond to different cues and adapt their behavior accordingly. Their research findings offer insights into the neural bases of emotion, memory and behavior. Using a combination of behavioral studies and neural analysis, they revealed how animals process both internal and external information to inform behaviors.
As a PhD student at Columbia University, Applegate worked with food-caching black-capped chickadees that remember and manage the locations of thousands of hidden seeds. Applegate developed a new behavioral paradigm for the quantitative analysis of seed-caching behavior and its underlying neurobiology in a controlled laboratory setting. Her work investigated the neural foundation of these behaviors, applying anatomical and functional approaches to identify specific brain regions that exhibit striking parallels to memory systems in mammals. These research findings expand and sharpen our understanding of the avian hippocampus and how its neural connections enable these behaviors. Applegate completed her PhD in 2023 and is currently a postdoctoral associate at Yale University.
Hindmarsh Sten’s doctoral research at The Rockefeller University focused on how internal and external factors coalesce in the neural circuits of fruit flies to sculpt behavioral priorities, such as fighting and mating. His multidisciplinary approach combined neurogenetics with neuronal stimulation and recordings of brain activity to gain a mechanistic understanding of how the fruit fly brain processes information in a context-dependent manner. Sten developed an elegant virtual reality system that allowed him to employ functional imaging to quantify the neuronal responses of a male fly as it perceived and interacted with a female fly or another male. He documented activation of distinct sensorimotor circuits that mediate mating behaviors such as pursuing a potential mate or repelling a rival male. The combination of detailed behavioral observations and manipulation of specific neural pathways provide a fuller picture of how internal states interact with sensory cues in fruit flies to influence complex social interactions. Sten completed his PhD in 2023 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University.
Nemko Prize in Cellular or Molecular Neuroscience: Marisol Soula
The Nemko Prize in Cellular or Molecular Neuroscience, supported by The Nemko Family, recognizes a young neuroscientist’s outstanding PhD thesis advancing our understanding of molecular, genetic, or cellular mechanisms underlying higher brain function and cognition. The award includes a $2,500 prize and travel to the SfN annual meeting.
The 2024 awardee of the Nemko Prize is Marisol Soula, who obtained her PhD in 2023. As a doctoral student in the Department of Neuroscience and Physiology at New York University, she combined cutting-edge electrophysiological and surgical techniques with behavioral tests in mice to examine the role of communication between brain regions and the patterns of electrical activity in neurons involved in memory. By recording electrical activity in the hippocampus of healthy mice and comparing those patterns with patterns of electrical activity in mice that had been genetically engineered as an animal model of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Soula discovered an abnormal pattern in the transgenic AD mice, which she found interferes with their memory storage processes. Comparing the abnormal patterns from the AD mice to patterns known to occur in humans diagnosed with epilepsy or AD, Soula found striking similarities. These elegant cross-species comparisons are key to better understanding how brains acquire, store, and use information. Soula’s discovery that this abnormal pattern is a common and epilepsy-independent phenomenon that perturbs communication between the hippocampus and other brain regions could inform strategies for restoring neuronal coordination. As such, her research could lead to the development of methods to ameliorate memory processes that go wrong in patients with neurodegenerative diseases. Soula plans to continue this work in patients with memory disorders as a neurosurgeon-scientist. During her graduate studies, she also trained and mentored undergraduate student volunteers in the laboratory.
Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award in Neuroscience:
Angelo Forli, Aditya Nair, and Camille Testard
The Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award in Neuroscience recognizes up to three young neuroscientists for outstanding research and educational pursuit in an international setting. The award is supported by The Gruber Foundation and includes a $25,000 prize and travel to the SfN annual meeting.
This year’s awardees are Angelo Forli, PhD, PhD candidate Aditya Nair, and Camille Testard, PhD. Each of these researchers uses advanced technologies to investigate the different brain pathways involved in social behaviors. Using both natural and laboratory environments, they incorporate interdisciplinary collaborations from fields such as physics, neurobiology, ethology, and machine learning to integrate different perspectives into their work.
Forli is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. In his investigation into how animals navigate in collective settings, Forli developed an innovative system that combines precise tracking of large groups of free-flying bats with wireless neural recording methods. He focused on the bats’ hippocampus, a fundamental brain area for navigation and memory. Using this highly sophisticated setup, he identified neural mechanisms underlying navigation in highly dynamic social settings as bats naturally forage. His research reveals that when bats forage together, they organize themselves in spatially and socially structured ways, and several features of this organization are encoded in the hippocampus. Beyond spatial coding, he found that the hippocampus tracks and maps the presence of other bats, their location, identity and sensory cues of other conspecifics, enabling successful navigation within the group. Forli’s groundbreaking study is the first to identify a neurobiological mechanism behind collective spatial behavior and reveal how brain mechanisms control naturalistic group behavior in animals. Moving forward, Forli plans to combine cutting-edge behavioral and neurophysiological technologies to simultaneously characterize the behavioral and neurophysiological mechanisms of collective behavior (one example of what he calls “natural intelligence”) at the neural network level.
Nair’s graduate research in the Computation and Neural Systems program at the California Institute of Technology combines neurobiology and machine learning to explore how the brain controls social behaviors that are disrupted in a wide range of developmental and mental health conditions. Originally from Singapore and India, Nair’s interdisciplinary work provides a theoretical framework of how emotional states are encoded in the brain, deepening our understanding of the persistence and intensity of complex behaviors such as aggression. His computational expertise enabled him to provide the first demonstration that an aggressive state in a mouse is encoded in the emergent dynamics of neural populations in a brain area called the ventromedial hypothalamus. This finding represents a new way of thinking about the hypothalamus and suggests that a common network computation is used to encode diverse affective states. Nair’s research also reveals that this computation is influenced by hormones and neuropeptides, offering insights into mechanisms used to implement long time-scale signals in the brain. His research raises new questions about how our internal affective states are influenced by genes, environmental factors, and neuropsychiatric drugs. Nair plans to return to Singapore as a principal investigator at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology (IMCB), A*STAR, where he hopes to investigate how internal affective states are altered in a wide range of mental health conditions.
Testard’s innovative field and laboratory research explores the complex relationship between the environment and social behaviors in animals. A junior fellow at Harvard University, she combines techniques from field ethology, brain imaging, and advanced genetic analysis. One of Testard’s groundbreaking approaches to studying primate brain function includes the first-ever wireless array neurophysiological brain recordings in pairs of macaques during spontaneous social interactions in the laboratory. The direct assessment of how neurons encode social information showed that neurons in the prefrontal and temporal cortex are involved in specific social behaviors such as grooming. She also is studying changes in neuroanatomy in a population of macaques on an uninhabited Puerto Rican island before and after a 2017 hurricane. She found that after the hurricane’s environmental devastation, the macaques became more social. As global warming exacerbates natural disasters, knowledge of how animals respond to extreme ecological changes and how their brains orchestrate rapid adaptive changes in social behavior is timely and vital. Deeper understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying the effects of animal sociality — such as resilience to trauma and adaptive impact of social support for survival and reproductive success — has clear human health implications regarding causes and consequences of social function and dysfunction.
SfN Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Young Investigator Award: Nicholas Bellono and Catherine Jensen Peña
The SfN Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Young Investigator Award recognizes the outstanding achievements and contributions by young neuroscientists who lead independent research groups. The award is supported by the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute and includes a $25,000 prize shared by the recipients and recipients’ travel to the SfN annual meeting.
This year’s recipients are Nicholas Bellono, PhD, and Catherine Jensen Peña, PhD. Both researchers apply interdisciplinary approaches to basic-science investigations of how neural pathways in the brain are affected by factors in an organism’s environment.
Bellono, a professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University, tackles long-standing fundamental questions in sensory biology that have yielded detailed descriptions of how unconventional model animals adapt to their ever-changing environments. His PhD thesis explored molecular mechanisms that control pigmentation in human skin in response to environmental factors such as sunlight, winning Brown University’s Joukowsky Foundation Outstanding Dissertation Prize. Bellono’s approach of reducing complex behaviors and physiological processes to their simplest components, such as a signaling pathway or single protein function, continued in his postdoctoral work exploring the molecular basis of chemosensation by the gut and electroreception in sharks.
The Bellono laboratory investigation of how jellyfish and sea anemones selectively sting prey but ignore irrelevant stimuli led to the discovery of ion channels that integrate both chemical and mechanical stimuli to control stinging. Bellono has also identified a novel family of receptors in octopuses’ suction cups that are involved in detection of surface-localized chemicals, which octopuses use to find prey. He has since continued exploring non-model systems including limb formation in walking fish, mechanisms of photosynthesis in animals, the piranha feeding frenzy, and more.
Peña is an assistant professor at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. Her work focuses on understanding how early life stress in humans and rodents shape brain development. Her research has led to the discovery of epigenetic, molecular, and cellular changes in several key brain regions that result from early life trauma. These genome-wide changes increase one’s risk of developing brain disorders such as depression and other mood, anxiety, and drug disorders. As a postdoctoral fellow and in her own lab, Peña has demonstrated creativity and pushed technological boundaries: using a combination of transgenic mice to track brain activity, genome-wide sequencing and computational methods, and gene therapy to regulate both molecules and brain activity in mice, Peña and her lab have identified new ways that early life stress increases stress vulnerability. Her discoveries push the field closer to more targeted treatments for individuals who experienced early life trauma.
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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.
