Péter Somogyi wins share of 1 million neuroscience prize

Science 11 Mar 11 Three scientists, including Professor Péter Somogyi of the University of Oxford, are to share The Brain Prize 2011, a major new award for neuroscience research. The €1 million prize is awarded by Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Foundation, a Danish charitable, non-profit organization. The new prize is given to one or more scientists who have distinguished themselves by an outstanding contribution to European neuroscience. Professor Somogyi is director of the Medical Research Council Anatomical Neuropharmacology Unit and professor of neurobiology at Oxford University. He shares the award with Tamás Freund of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, Hungary, and Professor György Buzsáki of Rutgers University in the USA. The Danish foundation said that the three researchers had won the award 'for their wide-ranging, technically and conceptually brilliant research on the functional organization of neuronal circuits in the cerebral cortex, especially in the hippocampus, a region that is crucial for certain forms of memory'. Professor Somogyi pioneered methods for characterising nerve cell circuits in the brain.