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Carla Shatz

Congratulations to our Head of Neuroscience Faculty, Carla J Shatz, who has won this year’s Kavli Prize in Neuroscience. She shares the prize with Eve Marder, former Faculty Member of the Neuronal Signaling Mechanisms Section, and Michael M Merzenich ‘for the discovery of mechanisms that allow experience and neural activity to remodel brain function.’

The Kavli Prizes are presented every two years in the fields of astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience to recognise pioneering advances in our understanding of existence.

Carla J Shatz is professor of biology & neurobiology at Stanford, and the director of Bio-X. Her work is focused on understanding the development of precise and orderly connections in the central nervous system. The prize acknowledges her demonstration of ‘how patterns of activity in the developing brain instruct and refine the arrangement of synapses between neurons.’ Her work in this field spawned the expression, ‘neurons that fire together, wire together’ as it connected developmental brain wiring mechanisms with adult learning and memory. She has headed our Neuroscience Faculty since 2001.

Merzenich’s work shows how experiences in adulthood can reorganise sensory circuits in the cerebral cortex, and Marder has explained the interplay between flexibility and stability in the nervous system. Together, the three laureates have defined the mechanisms behind brains remaining stable while changes related to development and learning occur.

The Prizes have been awarded since 2008 and are a partnership between The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Kavli Foundation in the US and The Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. They are chosen by committees whose members are recognised by six of the world’s science societies and academies.

Here is a video, shared by her University news team, of Carla Shatz celebrating the prize and thanking her lab members for support.