SfN Members Win 2017 Brain Prize

SfN members Ray Dolan and Wolfram Schultz, along with Peter Dayan, have been awarded the 2017 Brain Prize for their multidisciplinary analysis of brain mechanisms that link learning to reward. This important research will enable neuroscientists to gain a more comprehensive understanding of human behavior and will shed light on disorders that involve decision-making, such as schizophrenia, drug addiction, gambling, and compulsive behavior.

Dolan is co-director of the new UCL-Max Planck Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, Schultz is a professor of neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, and Dayan is director of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London.

The 1 million euro Brain Prize is awarded by the Lundbeck Foundation to one or more scientists who have made outstanding contributions to European brain research. The prize will be presented by His Royal Highness the Crown Prince of Denmark on May 4 in Copenhagen.

“The research of these three prizewinners offers far-reaching perspectives on our understanding of human behavior and how we make decisions,” professor Sir Colin Blakemore, chair of the foundation’s Selection Committee, said in a press release. “Their research has also provided a valuable key to understanding what goes wrong when people succumb to compulsive gambling, drug addiction, obsessive compulsive disorder and schizophrenia.”