- 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Intro
Norwegian psychologist and neuroscientist, who is Professor of Neuroscience at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014 with May-Britt Moser and John O'Keefe "for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain".
Education and Work Experience
1995, Ph. D. in Neurobiology, University of Oslo 1998-Present, Professor of Neuroscience in NTNU
2002-2012, Founding Director of Centre for the Biology of Memory
2007-Present, Founding Director of Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at NTNU
Honors and Awards
2004, Member of The Norwegian Academy of Science
2014, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Major Academic Achievements
Edvard Moser focuses on neural network computations in the cortex, with particular emphasis on dynamic representation of space and memory in the hippocampal-entorhinal system.
He has studied how spatial location and spatial memory are computed in the brain. His most noteworthy contribution is probably the discovery of grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, which points to the entorhinal cortex as a hub for the brain network that makes us find our way. He has shown how a variety of functional cell types in the entorhinal microcircuit contribute to representation of self-location, how the outputs of the circuit are used by memory networks in the hippocampus, and how episodic memories are separated from each other in the early stages of the hippocampal memory storage. The discovery of grid cells and their control of population dynamics in the hippocampus have led to a revision of established views of how the brain calculates self-position and spatial mapping and is becoming one of the first non- sensory cognitive functions to be characterized at a mechanistic level in neuronal networks.