Society for Neuroscience 2026 Outstanding Career and Research Achievement Awards
Washington, D.C. – The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) will honor four pioneering researchers whose innovative work has transformed the understanding of the nervous system with this year’s Outstanding Career and Research Achievement Awards. This year’s awards honor scientists whose work ranges from the structure of receptors to the structure of the cortex and from theoretical models of plasticity to therapies designed to harness it to treat addiction. The awards will be presented at Neuroscience 2026, November 14–18 in Washington, D.C.
“The Society is thrilled to honor these preeminent leaders of the field, whose unique and critical insights have deepened our understanding of the brain,” said SfN President Nicholas C. Spitzer, PhD. “Their work has elucidated structures of both the cortex and individual receptors and created both predictive models and compounds to treat drug addiction, producing landmark findings that will continue to influence the field for years to come.”
Ralph W. Gerard Prize in Neuroscience: David C. Van Essen
The Ralph W. Gerard Prize in Neuroscience — the highest recognition conferred by SfN — recognizes an outstanding scientist who has made significant contributions to neuroscience throughout his or her career. The prize is named for Dr. Ralph W. Gerard, a revered neuroscientist who was instrumental in establishing the Society for Neuroscience and served as its honorary president. The honoree receives a $30,000 prize in addition to complimentary registration and travel to SfN’s annual meeting.
David C. Van Essen, PhD, Alumni Endowed Professor of Neuroscience at Washington University School of Medicine, is a highly innovative figure in neuroscience who spearheaded the analysis of cortical structure, function, connectivity, development, and evolution in humans and nonhuman primates. As a postdoctoral researcher, Van Essen recognized that the cerebral cortex’s sheet-like organization enabled two-dimensional representations (“cortical flatmaps”) that preserved important spatial relationships, revealed previously hidden patterns, and enabled novel comparative analyses. He proposed the influential hypothesis of distributed hierarchical organization of the cortex and pioneered a multimodal approach combining differences in function, architecture, connectivity, and/or topographic organization (the “FACT” approach) to discover distinct visual areas in the macaque. His tension-based theory of morphogenesis helps explain how nervous systems become compactly wired. Van Essen also co-led the Human Connectome Project, a large-scale effort that acquired, processed, and freely shared unprecedented amounts of high-quality neuroimaging and associated behavioral data from approximately 1,200 healthy young adult twins and their non-twin siblings. Under the leadership of Van Essen and his colleagues, the Human Connectome Project helped establish large-scale data sharing as a model for neuroscience research. Throughout his career, Van Essen has been at the forefront of charting the cerebral cortex and has fundamentally shaped the understanding of cortical parcellation in humans and nonhuman primates.
Jacob P. Waletzky Award: David E. Olson
The Jacob P. Waletzky Award recognizes an early career scientist (within 15 years of receiving his or her PhD or MD degree) whose independent research has led to significant conceptual and empirical contributions to the understanding of drug addiction and who plans to continue to make significant contributions to addiction research and treatment. The award is endowed by The Waletzky Award Prize Fund and the Waletzky Family. The award includes a $30,000 prize and complimentary registration and travel to SfN’s annual meeting.
David E. Olson, PhD, the director of the Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics and a professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine at the University of California, Davis, is providing new insights into the mechanisms of addiction and the development of potentially transformative therapies. Olson’s work focuses on harnessing compound-induced neuroplasticity to treat neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases, including addiction, which often cause neurons in the prefrontal cortex to atrophy. His laboratory demonstrated that psychedelics from multiple chemical classes promote cortical neuroplasticity and coined the term “psychoplastogens” for compounds with rapid and lasting effects on neuronal structure. In preclinical models, some psychoplastogens can promote dendritic growth and synapse formation in cortical neurons after a single dose. Certain compounds have also demonstrated antidepressant-like effects and reductions in drug-seeking behavior. He was the first to demonstrate that psychedelic compounds like LSD and psilocin are effective psychoplastogens. These compounds have demonstrated preclinical and early clinical signs of efficacy for multiple substance use disorders (including opioid and alcohol use disorders) and have the potential to treat co-occurring conditions such as depression and schizophrenia. Moreover, by studying the basic biochemical and circuit-level mechanisms, Olson has developed alternatives designed to reduce hallucinogenic effects. He co-founded Delix Therapeutics, which is scheduled to begin a phase 2 clinical trial of one of his compounds this year. Olson’s pioneering research serves as a cornerstone of the burgeoning field of chemically induced neuroplasticity and has the potential to substantially change how substance use disorders are treated.
Julius Axelrod Prize: Eric Gouaux
The Julius Axelrod Prize honors a scientist with distinguished achievements in the broad field of neuropharmacology or a related area and exemplary efforts in mentoring early career scientists. The award, endowed by the Eli Lilly and Company Foundation, includes a $30,000 prize in addition to complimentary registration and travel to SfN’s annual meeting. The recipient is also invited to give the keynote address for a symposium at the National Institute of Mental Health in the spring of 2027.
Eric Gouaux, PhD, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and senior scientist at the Vollum Institute at Oregon Health & Science University, has transformed the understanding of the molecular structures and mechanisms of neurotransmitter receptors and transporters. He has shown how a water-soluble toxin transforms into a membrane-spanning pore, elucidated the molecular structure and biochemical mechanism of ionotropic glutamate receptors and neurotransmitter transporters, and developed novel chromatography methods that accelerated membrane protein structure determination. He provided unprecedented insight into the molecular architectures of AMPA and NMDA receptors and helped explain how their structures support their distinct functions. He also provided critical insights into GABA and glycine receptors, acid-sensing ion channels, and monoamine transporters. His lab is also one of the three major NIH-funded cryo-electron microscopy labs in the U.S. and has developed methods to determine the structures of native neurotransmitter receptors obtained directly from brain tissue. More recently, he has used innovative biochemical approaches to study the molecular complex underlying mechanoreception in auditory hair cells. Throughout his career, Gouaux has remained dedicated to his students and has trained 74 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. His methods of encouraging independence, exploration, and ambitious undertakings in a collaborative and supportive environment have helped equip his trainees to become leaders in the field.
Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience: Wulfram Gerstner
The Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience is given to an individual whose activities have produced a significant cumulative contribution to theoretical models or computational methods in neuroscience or who has made a particularly noteworthy recent advance in theoretical or computational neuroscience. The prize is endowed by the Swartz Foundation, and the award includes a $30,000 prize and complimentary registration and travel to SfN’s annual meeting.
Wulfram Gerstner, PhD, the director of the Laboratory of Computational Neuroscience at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), has made foundational contributions to several major areas of theoretical and computational neuroscience — from the theory of synaptic plasticity and neural coding to the development of simplified neuron models. He helped develop early theoretical models of spike-timing-dependent plasticity that anticipated influential experimental findings, a landmark example of theory preceding and guiding experimentation. He also contributed to the development of the three-factor learning model, helping connect plasticity to behavioral learning, and continues to expand the theoretical landscape of plasticity with the development of CLAPP (Contrastive, Local, and Predictive Plasticity), an important bridge between neuroscience and machine learning. Gerstner has also made seminal contributions to the study of neural coding and network dynamics, starting with mean-field descriptions of recurrent neural networks and, more recently, generalizing the mean-field approach to engage with the NeuroAI concept of neural manifolds. His predictive and interpretable models include the Spike Response Model for capturing input-output properties of neurons with minimal parameters and the Adaptive Exponential Integrate-and-Fire Model, which is one of the most widely used single-neuron models in computational neuroscience. His unique combination of mathematical rigor, close engagement with experimental data, and broad theoretical vision has helped shape the culture of computational neuroscience and the emerging field of NeuroAI.
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The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) is an organization of nearly 30,000 basic scientists and clinicians who study the brain and the nervous system.
