News

Announcing the Center for the Physics of Biological Function, a joint endeavor between Princeton University and the City University of New York to investigate biophysics.

Experimental & theoretical neuroscientists from 21 countries will collaborate to understand brainwide circuits for complex behavior.

The William James Award honors individuals for their lifetime of significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology and international recognition for their outstanding contributions to scientific psychology.

Associate research scholar Chris Baldassano develops a method for identifying event structure in continuous narrative perception and memory.

The 2017 Freedman Prize for Exceptional Basic Research was awarded to Ilana B. Witten, Assistant Professor of Psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, whose lab works on interrogating the neural circuitry that supports reward learning and decision making. 

CV Starr Fellow and lab head Alexander Nectow, along with collaborators at The Rockefeller University, has identified a novel neural circuit mechanism through which the brain controls energy balance.

Sabine Kastner, Professor of Psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, helps explain neuroscience to curious young minds through an academic journal for children and outreach activities on campus.

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."