Silvia Arber receives 2018 Pradel Research Award

Silvia Arber, Biozentrum of the University of Basel and Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, will receive the 2018 Pradel Research Award. The award is presented annually by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States to recognize neuroscientists whose work is making major contributions to our understanding of the nervous system. The neurobiologist Silvia Arber receives the award for her "research on the assembly, structure and function of motor circuits, which resulted in fundamental contributions to our understanding of the organizational principles of the motor system including the spinal cord and the brainstem". In their communication about the Pradel Research Award the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) stresses: "Arber's work no only reveals the functional organization of circuits at the core of motor control but has the potential to improve recovery in people and animals that have lost or attenuated motor function." Silvia Arber, according to the NAS "one of the world's most prominent neurobiologist", is both Senior group leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI) and Professor of Neurobiology at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel. After studying biology at the Biozentrum, Arber carried out her PhD thesis in the laboratory of Professor Pico Caroni at the FMI. With a long-term fellowship awarded by the Human Frontier Science Program, Arber subsequently joined Professor Thomas Jessell's laboratory at Columbia University in New York.