The Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences is delighted to announce that Prof. Haim Sompolinsky has been awarded the prestigious Gruber Neuroscience Prize.
The Gruber International Prize Program honors individuals in the fields of cosmology, genetics, and neuroscience. The honorees’ groundbreaking work provides new models that inspire and enable fundamental shifts in knowledge and culture. Each prize includes a gold medal and a cash prize of $500,000.
Alongside Prof. Sompolinsky, the other 2022 winners were Prof. Larry Abbott (Columbia University), Prof. Emery Neal Brown (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Massachusetts General Hospital), and Prof. Terrence Sejnowski (the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and UC San Diego). In a press release, the Gruber Foundation said that they selected these researchers because they have been “pioneers in the fields of computational and theoretical neuroscience, fields that have become crucial to helping scientists unravel the complexities of neural networks in the brain. Using mathematics, physics, statistics, and machine learning, they have generated theories, models, and computational tools that have transformed the field of neuroscience and provided profound insights into the nature of the brain and the mind.”
The Gruber Foundation honored Prof. Sompolinsky due to his “pioneering research [that] laid the basis for the creation of innovative attractor-network models that describe the collective behavior and informational processing of large, complex neural circuits in the brain. He has also described how the combination of neuronal activity and inhibition lead to stable patterns of activity in the brain – findings that have profoundly influenced our understanding of brain systems.”
