MIT’s Elly Nedivi Honored for Her Research on the Cerebral Cortex

Elly Nedivi, the William R. and Linda R. Young Professor of Neuroscience in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the 2023 recipient of the Krieg Cortical Kudos Discoverer Award from the Cajal Club.

The club’s award, first bestowed in 1987, honors outstanding established investigators studying the cerebral cortex, the brain’s outer layers where circuits of neurons enable functions ranging from sensory processing to cognition. These circuits can constantly remodel their connections to adapt the brain to experience, a phenomenon called plasticity, that underlies learning and memory.

With a focus on the visual cortex, Dr. Nedivi’s lab investigates the molecular and cellular mechanisms that enable plasticity in the developing and adult brain, including identification of the genes whose expression is involved, characterization of the cellular functions of the proteins those genes encode, and studies of synaptic and neuronal remodeling as it happens in live, behaving animals.

“I am honored to be recognized with this award and to be following in the footsteps of many previous recipients whose work I admire and respect,” said Dr. Nedivi.

Dr. Nedivi received a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Stanford University Medical School and completed her postdoctoral training at The Weizmann Institute in Israel.