Sabatini and Song Receive $15,000 Young Investigator Award
For immediate release.
SABATINI AND SONG RECEIVE $15,000 YOUNG INVESTIGATOR AWARD
Recognizes young neuroscientists’ outstanding achievements
Washington, DC — The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) today awarded the Young Investigator Award to co-recipients Bernardo L. Sabatini, MD, PhD, of Harvard Medical School and Hongjun Song, PhD, of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine during Neuroscience 2008, the SfN annual meeting and the world’s largest source of emerging news on brain science and health. Supported by AstraZeneca, the award includes $15,000 to be split between the recipients and recognizes the outstanding achievements of young neuroscientists.
SfN established the award in 1983. This year, two outstanding neuroscientists who received an advanced professional degree within the past ten years were selected. Sabatini and Song are innovative and creative researchers who have made significant discoveries that contribute to the field.
“Supporting young neuroscientists is a cornerstone of SfN’s mission,” said Eve Marder, president of SfN. “Both Drs. Sabatini and Song have demonstrated a quality of work, impact of discovery, and creative methods that mark them as emerging leaders in the field.”
Sabatini has provided novel insight into synaptic signaling. Over the past seven years, he applied his knowledge and skill to study central questions of learning and memory in the mammalian brain. Using cutting-edge technology to visualize synapses with exception resolution — two-photon confocal microscopes — Sabatini and his colleagues have made a number of fundamental discoveries, which include applying electrophysiology and imaging approaches to examine rodent models of human disease. Their research has uncovered findings that will serve as a springboard for more penetrating studies of synaptic function in the future.
Song has made major contributions to the understanding of how new neurons from adult neural stem cells become integrated into the existing neuronal circuitry. During the past five years, he has pioneered the study of molecular mechanisms regulating development of new neurons in the adult brain in vivo, and has been a leading researcher of adult neural stem cells and neurogenesis. Song’s group has developed a “single-cell genetic” approach that allows birth-dating of newborn neurons and performing gain- or loss-of-function analysis at the single cell level in vivo with advanced technologies such as confocal imaging. His discoveries have profound influence in many areas of neuroscience.
The Society for Neuroscience is an organization of more than 38,000 basic scientists and clinicians who study the brain and nervous system.
