PNI professor Sabine Kastner, M.D., Ph.D., has won the 2024 Golden Brain Award.

Established in 1983, the annual award given by the Minerva Foundation recognizes an intrepid scientist “…at the forefront of research for significant findings of vision and the brain,” according to the award’s website. The honor comes with a namesake golden brain trophy.

“We are delighted to award the Minerva Foundation Golden Brain Award 2024 to Sabine Kastner for her groundbreaking studies on the mechanisms underlying visual attention,” said Daniel Wolpert, Ph.D., professor of neuroscience at Columbia University and the chair of the award committee. “The Golden Brain awardee is chosen on the basis of innovative investigations and the resulting influence of those findings on the field of vision and the brain.”

Dr. Kastner is only the sixth woman to receive the award in the 40-year history of the foundation, proceeded by two of her former mentors: the late Princeton professor Anne Treisman, Ph.D. (1996), and Leslie Ungerleider, Ph.D. (2011).

The recognition is exceptionally notable as it is one of the first times the Golden Brain Award has honored a neuroscientist who connects disparate disciplines and draws inspiration from traditionally siloed areas of science.

“I have always been somebody who is going in-between worlds,” Dr. Kastner said. “I'm a trained monkey physiologist but then I left that field when functional brain imaging came online and did a lot of work in the human brain.”

History major turned neuroscientist

Born and raised in Germany, Dr. Kastner didn’t set out to be a scientist from the outset. She initially pursued the humanities as an undergraduate at Georg-August University of Göttingen, where she earned the German equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in history and philosophy.

“Life sciences were never on my mind,” Dr. Kastner said. “I wanted to become a mathematician after high school, but I was told that it was a male-dominated field, and I should not even try as a female.”

A fortuitous lecture at her college by the eminent physician and neurophysiologist Otto Creutzfeldt, M.D., though, changed her life course. Dr. Creutzfeldt’s “absolutely eye-opening” talk integrated both neurobiology and philosophy. Dr. Kastner was impressed but still had suggestions for how his research could be improved.

Never shy to share her mind, Dr. Kastner phoned him soon after to share her appreciation for his lecture and offer some feedback.

“In Germany after World War II, he was the biggest person in neurobiology. A real hot shot,” Dr. Kastner said. “It’d be like calling John Hopfield as some random person to congratulate him on the Nobel Prize.”

Dr. Creutzfeldt’s secretary tried screening her call, but despite her best efforts, Dr. Kastner got through, and eventually came to study under his tutelage. Dr. Kastner went on to earn her M.D. from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in 1993, followed by her Ph.D. in neurophysiology from the Georg-August University of Göttingen in 1994. 

After her doctoral studies, Dr. Kastner conducted postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry and completed an internship in psychiatry. She then joined Leslie Ungerleider’s and Robert Desimone’s lab at the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) in 1996 before accepting a faculty position at Princeton in 2000.

From monkeys to humans (and now both) 

Though her primate of interest has fluctuated – focusing on either sapiens or simians (and now both) – Dr. Kastner’s research theme has been firmly consistent.

“Throughout my entire career, I've been interested in how we select information from our crowded visual environments,” Dr. Kastner said. “We see all these objects that are around us and we basically have to figure out what interests us the most to guide our behaviors. The brain has a relatively limited processing capacity, so it cannot process all the information that we are constantly bombarded with. And for that reason, we need basic mechanisms in the brain to select information in meaningful ways.”

As a pioneer in fMRI, Dr. Kastner first mapped the component regions involved in the brain’s attention network during her time at NIMH. It was that work on humans that brought her to Princeton in 2000, where she focused on establishing the fMRI research facility and program.

In 2010, Dr. Kastner returned to studying nonhuman primates to ask new questions based on her findings on the brain network for attention in humans.

“A lot of cognition happens on time scales around half a second, so this poses the problem of how the brain can route the information that comes in from the visual system to the frontal cortex and then affect some kind of motor act,” Dr. Kastner said. “All of this is happening within just 300 – 400 milliseconds. That seems like a real tough problem. So we set out to basically study network physiology to understand network interactions rather than just computations that are done in individual network parts.”

Inspired by conversations with her mentor, Anne Treisman, Dr. Kastner addressed this problem by training monkeys to perform attention tasks well-established in human research, while simultaneously recording brain activity across the attention network to glean insights about the human brain.

The findings in monkeys then led her return to studying humans, in collaboration with Robert Knight, M.D. at the University of California, Berkely. Together, they have been testing ideas generated from studies on monkeys by recording similar activity in patients undergoing brain surgery to treat epilepsy.

Psychiatry roots come full circle

Dr. Kastner’s findings have not only revealed how the attentive brain works, but are also now inspiring novel treatments for people with schizophrenia. Her research on how the pulvinar, a brain region that coordinates the attention network, has spurred clinical trials currently in progress testing how deep brain stimulation may help patients with psychosis.

“Disorders like schizophrenia are described as having a disordered cortical network,” Dr. Kastner said. “The idea is that by stimulating the pulvinar, you could basically coordinate the disorganized networks with deep brain stimulation in those structures.”

This potential treatment is of particular significance for Dr. Kastner.

“When I started out in my first year of a psychiatry residency, I was working in a ward with schizophrenia patients,” Dr. Kastner said. “The fact that I couldn’t help these people discouraged me in the end so much that I decided medicine is not for me and I wanted to just be a scientist and see if I can help people in other ways.”

Recognition across her career

Dr. Kastner has been recognized for trailblazing work throughout her career, including the Young Investigator Award of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (2005), the Society for Neuroscience’s Award for Education in Neuroscience (2019), elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2022), the George A. Miller Prize in Cognitive Neuroscience (2023) and recipient of a prestigious Conte Center grant from the NIMH (2023).

In addition to research, Dr. Kastner is heavily involved in science outreach and education, and co-founded the journal Frontiers for Young Minds in 2013,  which produces articles about the latest and most exciting findings in science for 8- to 15-year-olds to boost their interest in STEM fields and topics. Since 2023, she has also served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Society for Neuroscience’s flagship publication, the Journal of Neuroscience.