JADHAV AND MA RECEIVE THE GRUBER INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH AWARD IN NEUROSCIENCE
SAN DIEGO — The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) has awarded The Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award in Neuroscience to Shantanu P. Jadhav, PhD, of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and Dengke K. Ma, PhD, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The award recognizes two promising young scientists for outstanding research and educational pursuit in an international setting. It is supported by The Gruber Foundation and includes $25,000 for each recipient. The award was presented during Neuroscience 2013, SfN’s annual meeting and the world’s largest source of emerging news about brain science and health.
“Neuroscience is a global endeavor that brings together the best and brightest from around the world,” said Larry Swanson, PhD, president of SfN. “It is with great pleasure we recognize the contributions these young scientists are making to our knowledge of how the brain works under normal and abnormal conditions.”
Jadhav’s research is leading to a new understanding about the neural basis of learning and memory. As a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF, Jadhav has helped to establish a link between a specific pattern of neural activity and memory. With this information, Jadhav and others hope to begin to identify the cellular basis of memory and understand how memories drive decision-making processes in the brain. Born in India, Jadhav earned his PhD from the University of California, San Diego.
Ma, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, is making important contributions to increasing scientists’ understanding of how the brain changes when deprived an adequate blood supply, as in the case of ischemia and stroke. His development of a novel behavioral paradigm helped uncover new information about the genes involved in sensing changes in oxygen levels. Such work may one day lead to novel therapeutic strategies. Ma, a citizen of the People’s Republic of China, received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University, and collaborated with researchers in the Czech Republic and Germany.
The Society for Neuroscience is an organization of nearly 42,000 basic scientists and clinicians who study the brain and nervous system.
