Knight Initiative News

Carla Shatz has won the Kavli Neuroscience Prize for her work in understanding how the brain forms the proper connections and Calvin Quate has won the Kavli Nanoscience Prize for his lead role in inventing the atomic force microscope.

The neurobiologist received the recognition for her work in understanding how the brain’s connections form. She will share a $1 million prize with two other winners.

Stanford neuroscientist Carla Shatz, PhD, who is director of Stanford Bio-X, got an urgent message to return a call to Norway. That’s when she learned that she had won the prestigious Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, along with Marder and Michael Merzenich, P

Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD, professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, is the winner of a $3 million 2016 Breakthrough Prize in life sciences for his contributions to the development of optogenetics.

Karl Deisseroth has been awarded a $3 million Breakthrough Prize in life sciences for his pioneering work in optogenetics. Stanford Physicists Xiao-Liang Qi and Leonardo Senatore won New Horizons in Physics Prizes for their outstanding contributions to fu

The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) will award the Donald B. Lindsley Prize to Matthew Lovett-Barron, PhD, of Stanford University. Supported by The Grass Foundation, the prize recognizes an outstanding PhD thesis in the area of general behavioral neuroscie

The awards are designed to encourage scientists to pursue creative research projects with the potential of leading to big improvements in health care.

Faculty, staff, residents and a student were honored for a variety of contributions to Stanford Medicine at the medical school’s 2015 commencement.

Carla Shatz has uncovered mechanisms that the brain uses to select which connections to strengthen or prune back as brain circuits form.

Carla Shatz's work has aided understanding of disorders such as autism, Alzheimer's

The Board of Directors of The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience is pleased to announce the 2015 McKnight Scholar Award recipients.

The bioengineer and psychiatrist will be honored for his seminal role in the field of optogenetics, which allows scientists to precisely manipulate nerve-cell activity in freely moving animals to study their behavior.

Assistant professors Amin Arbabian, Michael Lepech, Marco Pavone, Manu Prakash and Sindy Tang awarded grants to help promising junior faculty pursue outstanding research while also improving education.

In addition to being scientifically important, Karl Deisseroth's research makes for some really cool-looking pictures.

The New York Stem Cell Foundation awarded pathologist Marius Wernig $200,000 to pursue stem cell research, and neurobiologist Lisa Giocomo $1.5 million to expand her lab and train other scientists.

Yesterday the National Institutes of Health handed out the first $46 million in funding for their BRAIN initiative. Stanford neuroscientists Mark Schnitzer and Michael Lin got one of those awards worth almost $1 million to develop improved ways of recordi

An idea that started as a long shot – using light to control the activity of the brain – has earned Karl Deisseroth the Keio prize in medicine. The technique, called optogenetics, is now widely used at Stanford and worldwide to understand the brain's wiri

McClelland recognized for his important and fundamental contributions to the use of neural networks to model cognitive processes of the brain.

Jennifer Dionne, Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, earned the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding researchers early in their careers.

Eight Stanford University scientists, including SNI Affiliates Michael Lin, Thomas Rando, and Tony Wyss-Coray, have received more than $17 million from the National Institutes of Health that will enable them to pursue innovative research in biomedicine.