2015 McKnight Scholar Awards

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

The McKnight Scholar Awards are granted to young scientists who are in the early stages of establishing their own independent laboratories and research careers and who have demonstrated a commitment to neuroscience. The Endowment Fund seeks to support innovative research designed to bring science closer to the day when diseases of the brain can be accurately diagnosed, prevented, and treated. The six McKnight Scholar Award recipients will each receive $75,000 per year for three years. They are:

Susanne Ahmari

University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA

Identifying Neural Circuit Changes Underlying OCD-related Behaviors

Marlene Cohen

University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA

Causal and Correlative Tests of the Hypothesis that the Neuronal Mechanisms Underlying Attention Involve Interactions between Cortical Areas 

Daniel Dombeck

Northwestern University
Evanston, IL

Functional Dynamics, Organization and Plasticiity of Place Cell Dendritic Spines

Surya Ganguli

Stanford University
Palo Alto, CA

From Neural data to Neurobiological Understanding through High Dimensional Statistics and Theory

 

Gaby Maimon

Rockefeller University
New York, NY

Neuronal Basis for the Internal Initiation of Action

Kay Tye

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA

Deconstructing the Distributed Neural Mechanisms in Emotional Valence Processing

Applications for next year’s awards will be available in September and are due in early January 2016. More information about McKnight’s neuroscience awards programs is available here

About The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience

The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience is an independent organization funded solely by The McKnight Foundation of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and led by a board of prominent neuroscientists from around the country. The McKnight Foundation has supported neuroscience research since 1977. The Foundation established the Endowment Fund in 1986 to carry out one of the intentions of founder William L. McKnight (1887-1979). One of the early leaders of the 3M Company, he had a personal interest in memory and brain diseases and wanted part of his legacy used to help find cures. The Endowment Fund makes three types of awards each year. In addition to the McKnight Scholar Award, they are the McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Awards, providing seed money to develop technical inventions to enhance brain research, and the McKnight Memory and Cognitive Disorders Awards, for scientists working to apply the knowledge achieved through basic research to human brain disorders that affect memory or cognition.