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Weston Fleming, a second-year graduate student in Ilana Witten’s group, has been selected to receive the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. The fellowship includes an annual stipend of $34,000 and an annual cost of education allowance of $12,000 for three years. Awardees are also encouraged to participate in world-wide professional development opportunities offered through the GRFP.

PNI researchers and their collaborators at Intel Labs recently published a review article in a special issue of Nature Neuroscience focusing on human brain mapping. The News at Princeton did a feature on the PNI-Intel collaboration, and included interviews with PNI faculty Jon Cohen, Ken Norman, and Nick Turk-Browne.

A new center is bringing together researchers from Princeton and Rutgers universities to apply computational modeling to the understanding of psychiatric diseases. The Rutgers-Princeton Center for Computational Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, which will open its doors this month, aims to improve the diagnosis of mental disorders, better predict their progression and eventually aid in developing treatments.

Alex will investigate the role of a brain area called the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN), in both depression and feeding-related behaviors. The dorsal raphe is a remarkably complex structure, comprised of numerous cell types, and Dr. Nectow plans to functionally dissect the role of the DRN’s component cell types in the healthy and depressed states. His goal is to elucidate the neural circuit mechanism underlying depression, which may ultimately aid in the development of novel therapies.

The American Philosophical Society will present Professor Emeritus Charlie Gross with the 2016 Karl Spencer Lashley Award "in recognition of his pioneering studies of the neurophysiology of higher visual funcitons and the neural basis of face recognition and object perception." The award will be presented to Dr. Gross on November 11, 2016 at the American Philosophical Society annual Autumn General Meeting.

Five Princeton University researchers are among 88 scientists nationwide to receive 2016 High-Risk, High-Reward Research awards from the National Institutes of Health, a series of four awards that recognize creative and exceptional biomedical research. Uri Hasson, associate professor of psych

Kanaka Rajan is one of eight recipients of a Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition, awarded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation for her proposal "Integrative theory of memory and cognitive processes."

Five Princeton University faculty members have been selected as inaugural faculty scholars by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Simons Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Selected as HHMI-Simons Faculty Scholars were Clifford Brangwynne, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering; Martin Jonikas, an assistant professor of molecular biology; and Coleen Murphy, professor of molecular biology and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. 

Sam Wang — explorer of the brain and wrangler of political polls — made a prediction in 2012 that turned out to be wrong.

NeuroBridges is a series of meetings that brings together brain scientists from Israel and the Arab world in hopes of fostering relationships across the political and religious fault lines that divide the Middle East. It grew from the friendship between Ahmed El Hady, an Egyptian neuroscientist at Princeton University, and his Israeli colleague Yonatan Loewenstein of the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

A novel intervention to control mosquito-borne diseases: Assistant Professor of Molecular Biology Mala Murthy and Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Carolyn McBride, both of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, will explore ways to interfere with mosquito courtship and mating to reduce mosquito populations.

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Researchers at several institutions including Princeton University have used a large-scale online study to establish two important links in the effort to better understand psychiatric conditions and the underlying mechanisms in the brain.

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A technology to uncover how the infant brain learns language and a microscope that can image and manipulate the inner workings of a functioning cell have been awarded funding through the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund.

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Neuroscientist Mala Murthy and a multidisciplinary team at Princeton University want to understand what happens in the brain when animals process information, communicate and socialize.

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