Peter Seeburg Integrative Neuroscience Prize

Eric Nestler, MD, PhD (left), of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Christian Lüscher, MD (right), of the University of Geneva were awarded the Peter Seeburg Integrative Neuroscience Prize in 2023.

The Peter Seeburg Integrative Neuroscience Prize, endowed by the Schaller-Nikolich Foundation, honors original and groundbreaking achievements in neuroscience.

The prize, named after the German neuroscientist Peter H. Seeburg, a pioneer in molecular neurobiology, was founded to recognize outstanding advances in the understanding of executive brain functions and cognitive processes. While the ultimate goal is to understand how the brain works as a whole, Peter Seeburg appreciated that complex questions often must be broken down in order to become accessible to experimental scrutiny.

In this spirit, the nominee will be expected to 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 award will be presented at the SfN annual meeting in odd years and at the FENS Forum in even years. Recipients will receive a $100,000 prize. Complimentary registration, transportation, and two nights hotel accommodations will be arranged for the awardee by that year’s hosting organization to the site of that year’s award presentation.

For more information, please review the Awards and Prizes FAQs.

Nomination Criteria & Materials

Nomination Criteria:

• Nominations must be made or endorsed by an SfN member.
• Self-nomination is not permitted.
• Nominees do not need to be SfN or FENS members.
• No person may nominate more than one candidate.
• Current SfN and FENS officers and councilors are ineligible for nomination.
• Due to potential conflicts of interest, members of the selection committee may not be the nominees, and they cannot serve as nominators nor write letters of recommendation for this prize.

Nomination materials include the following:

• One required nomination letter describing the nominee’s contribution to the field
• A one-page statement of research achievements
• Current CV without publications, maximum five pages
• List of peer-reviewed publications without meeting abstracts
• A list of the nominee’s 10 most important papers

Eligibility

Nominees must be at least 15 years post-PhD. Nominations of women and historically under-represented groups are strongly encouraged. 

Past Awardees

• 2023: Christian Lüscher, MD and Eric Nestler, MD, PhD
• 2022: Robert Malenka, MD, PhD
• 2021: Peter Jonas, MD