Society for Neuroscience Young Scientist Achievement and Research Award 2022

The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) will recognize six early-career researchers whose work has transformed our understanding of the neurodynamics of
memory, navigation, social behavior, and disease states.
Their work spans a wide range of neuroscience topics and approaches, from nanoscale studies of synaptic structures to high-level demonstrations
of the neural origins of social interactions.
The award will be presented
during the Society for Neuroscience SfN 2022 Annual Meeting.

Gina Turrigiano, Chair of SfN, said: "This year's Young Prize winners demonstrate the fearless creativity and tenacity needed to make foundational discoveries in the field of neuroscience, and the breadth of their work illustrates the diversity
of approaches needed to gain a deeper understanding of the interactions between neural activity, behaviour and health.
" "By developing new tools and ideas, and finding the best model systems needed to illuminate their scientific questions, these young researchers remind us of the value of
a persistent and risk-taking approach to research.
"

Jennifer N.
Bourne Award for Ultrastructure of the Brain: Linnaea Ostroff

The recently established Jennifer N.
Bourne Prize for Brain Ultrastructure: recognizes outstanding work
by young neuroscientists "advancing our understanding of brain structure and function at the nanoscale.
" Named after Jennifer N.
Bourne, an electron microscopist and director of core facilities for studying the plasticity of synaptic structures, the award recognizes researchers
who have been appointed less than 5 years after their academic appointment.
Byrne died
suddenly in 2021.
The $5,000 prize was funded
by Kristen M.
Harris.

Neurons communicate with each other through synapses, and the ends of the neurons that send signals are very close
to the ends of the neurons that receive the signals.
Synapses vary in size, structure, and molecular composition, and stronger synapses can support neural circuits
related to learning and memory.
This year's Bourne Prize winner, assistant professor Linnaea Ostroff at the University of Connecticut, used electron microscopy to study the nanoscale structural details of rodent synapses undergoing learning paradigms to understand changes
in synapses that support animal learning.
Ostroff's work reveals important, sometimes surprising
, details about the role that neuronal protein-building mechanisms play in the learning process.
She noted that during memory formation, the protein-building machinery of neurons shifts to specific individual synapses activated by learning, suggesting that local protein building plays a role
in synaptic reinforcement.
In addition, her electron microscopy work showed that axons — long arms-like extensions of neurons that act as conduits for electrical signals — are able to build new proteins locally, something previously thought not to happen
in the adult brain.

Ostroff's work combines high-resolution microscopy with molecular methods to attach fluorescent or other tags to a variety of proteins and cell types, which can keep pushing boundaries
by providing richer information about the cellular and structural details of synapses 。 Different synapses can have unique combinations of proteins and other molecules, depending on the neuronal types involved and the dynamics of brain activity, and Ostroff is developing a technique that can label several proteins simultaneously to better understand synaptic structures in all neuronal circuits involved in learning and memory, including any potential differences
between male and female animals.

Donald B.
Lindsley Award in Behavioral Neuroscience: Lyle Kingsbury

The Donald B.
Lindsey Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience, funded by the Grass Foundation, recognizes an outstanding doctoral dissertation
in the field of behavioral neuroscience in general.
Established in 1979 in honor of Donald B.
Lindsley, an early trustee of the Glass Foundation, the award awarded the winner a $5,000 prize
.

When two animals interact, their brains become synchronized, and each animal's pattern of neuronal activity is similar
.
Research by this year's Lindsley Prize winner Kingsbury suggests that synchronization in the brains of mice can also predict the outcome of
some social interactions.
As a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, Kingsbury used miniature microscopes embedded in the prefrontal cortex of mice to simultaneously monitor the activity
of hundreds of individual neurons in pairs of awake, active animals.
The prefrontal cortex is an area of the brain that is involved
in a wide range of social behaviors in humans and other animals.
By recording detailed neuronal activity in interacting mice, Kingsbury found that the two sets of neurons worked together to produce synchronized activity
.
One group of neurons behaved in line with the mouse's own behavior, and the other with its social partners
.
In addition, he showed that the degree of brain synchronization between the two mice was related to
the competitive relationship formed between them.
In an experimental setup commonly used to test social dominance, two mice were sent to either end
of a narrow tube.
Kingsbury found that how synchronized the rodent brains were at the onset of the interaction predicted whether one of the mice would obey and retreat
from the tube.
The higher the hierarchical relationship, the stronger the synchronicity, suggesting that brain synchronicity has a potential functional role
in the characteristics of social relations.

In different experiments, Kingsbury found different patterns
of neural activity associated with other mouse sexes.
He experimentally altered neural activity using optogenetic tools, showing that activating neurons involved in sex-specific signaling patterns can influence preferred behavior
toward males and females.
Kingsbury is now a postdoc at Harvard University, where he studies how neuronal activity in the prefrontal cortex can flexibly adjust decision-making strategies for natural behaviors, such as foraging and socializing
.

Nemko Award in Cellular or Molecular Neuroscience: Jenny Lu

Supported by the Nemko family, the Nemko Prize for Cell or Molecular Neuroscience recognizes a distinguished doctoral dissertation
by a young neuroscientist who has advanced our understanding of the molecular, genetic or cellular mechanisms underlying higher brain function and cognition.
The winner will receive a prize of $
2,500.

When navigating the world, the animal's brain must coordinate many different information, including visual cues about its surroundings, the direction the animal is facing, and the speed and direction
of body movement.
This year's Nemko Prize winner is Jenny Lu, a student in the Harvard-MIT MD program, whose work sheds light on the dynamic neurobiological details
of navigation.

In his Harvard Medical School paper, Lu examines how navigational information is encoded and processed
in the brains of fruit flies.
Lu and his colleagues tethered the flies to a spherical treadmill in a virtual reality environment and monitored their neural activity
as they walked.
She discovered a neural circuit that combines
the direction of the fruit fly with the input of the insect's body-centered velocity.
Through highly detailed maps of connections in the fruit fly's brain, she discovered how the wiring of neural circuits translates these inputs into a representation of the fly's velocity in the external environment
.
This work establishes the first cellular mechanism
for how the brain converts vector-based information from a body-centered coordinate frame to a world-centric coordinate frame.

Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award: Marianna Zazhytska and Maneul Valero

The Peter and Patricia Gruber International Neuroscience Research Award recognizes the outstanding research and further studies
of two young neuroscientists in an international environment.
Winners will each receive $25,000
.
The award is funded
by the Gruber Foundation.
This year's winners are Marianna Zazhytska and Manuel Valero
.

Loss of smell can be a harbinger
of Alzheimer's disease and COVID-19 infection.
One of this year's Gruber Prize winners, Columbia University postdoctoral fellow Marianna Zazhytska, was in the early stages
of an Alzheimer's-related loss of smell (partial or complete loss) when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
When reports of olfactory loss in COVID-19 patients began to appear, she turned to studying how respiratory viruses affect olfactory receptor function
.
Olfactory receptors are complex proteins embedded on the surface of nasal neurons that attach to
odor molecules.
Zazhytska found that in humans and hamsters, SARS-CoV-2 infection led to a general decrease
in the activity of olfactory receptor genes and related signaling molecules.
She linked this decrease in activity to the destruction of the genomic tissue of olfactory neurons, even though the cells were not directly infected
by the virus.
These findings suggest that the SARS-CoV-2 virus can impair the function of
cells it does not directly infect.
When Zazhytska restarted studying Alzheimer's disease, she found commonalities between cellular responses to Alzheimer's disease and SARS-CoV-2 infection, including disruption of the genomic structure of olfactory receptors
.
Her research suggests that the olfactory system may be like a canary in a coal mine, warning of impending disease
by shutting down its activity.
In her future work as an independent scientist, she plans to investigate what triggers the rapid disruption of the genomic structure of olfactory receptor genes, and further explore the possibility
that detecting disruption in the olfactory system could help predict and better understand neurodegeneration.

Every night, our brain enters a period of deep sleep known as slow-wave sleep, during which the brain cycles through cycles of activity and silence, known as the upward and downward states
.
Previously, it was thought that there were no neuronal firing in the brain during quiet periods, but Man Manuel Valero, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Neuroscience at New York University Langone Medical Center and winner of the 2022 Gruber Prize, found that there is a class of neurons active
in the cerebral cortex during quiet periods.
By recording the activity of more than 10,000 neurons in awake and asleep rodents, he found that these cells also behaved in the opposite way when awake — they were quiet
when other neurons were active.
But the exact identities of these reverse neurons remain uncertain
.
Valero used an optogenetic approach — by which researchers can use light sources to control the activity of genetically engineered neurons — to test many candidate neuron types
.
Through this work, he revealed the cellular properties of low-state neurons, leading to the rare discovery of a new cell type
in the cortex.
Valero and his colleagues further showed that disrupting the activity of active neurons in a low state interferes with memory formation
.
In another work, Valero developed a new method to study low-level neuronal activity in awake mice, through which he revealed how location cells, the hippocampal neurons
that encode information about the animal's location in its environment, integrate opposing activation and silence signals.
Valero plans to return to his native Spain to become an independent investigator at Madrid's Cajal Institute, where he will continue to record a large number of neurons to decipher how activating and inhibiting brain signals combine to support navigation and memory
.

Young Researcher Award: Michael Yartsev

The Young Investigator Award recognizes outstanding achievements and contributions
by young neuroscientists who lead independent research groups.
The $15,000 prize was provided
by Sunovion Pharmaceuticals.

The life of a bat is much
more complicated than it seems.
Therefore, its brain needs to take on and solve many complex tasks
.
When perched in caves, bats need to maintain active communication with other members of the colony; When flying at night, bats need to navigate the three-dimensional world; After arriving at the long-awaited feeding site, they face challenges with collective social behaviors such as foraging, while also being aware (listening) to friendly and unfriendly behaviors
among other bats.
The most incredible thing is that bats solve all these complex problems
very well.
This year's Young Investigator Award winner, Associate Professor Michael Yartsev at the University of California, Berkeley, is using fruit bats' extraordinary behavioral abilities to understand the neural origins
of spatial coding, flexible communication, and social behavior.
As a neuroscientist and engineer, Yartsev has been working on big problems in the field that are often difficult (if not impossible) to solve with traditional model systems, and has further developed the tools
needed for his research.

Using a custom-made flight room and wireless brain-recording device, Yartsev has demonstrated that neural activity patterns in the hippocampus, brain regions involved in navigation and memory, can encode information about the bat's past, present and future location, guiding the animal along
a continuous locomotion path.
In addition, with tiny wireless microscopes, his lab has shown that when bats fly in familiar environments, neural activity in their hippocampus is stable
over several weeks of different flights.
In addition, Yartsev has also established a multi-animal wireless technology that can record the neural activity of the brains of many animals at the same time, so as to better study the neural mechanisms
related to real-world social behavior.
With these tools, he demonstrated that the neuronal activity of two (or more) interacting bats became highly synchronized, and that this synchronization was stronger
between bats that stayed together for a longer period of time.
By extending social research to groups, his lab shows how signals within and between brains contain information about key characteristics needed for group communication, such as behavioral traits of group members and the relationships between
them.
Finally, in his vocal learning work, Yartsev explores the ability of bats to
adapt to their vocal communication.
By playing recordings within the bat sound range, exposed animals adjust their own sounds to other frequencies to reduce interference from disturbing noise
.
The study shows that, like humans, bats can adjust their vocal communication
based on external input.
Yartsev continues to delineate anatomical pathways and neural calculations that can facilitate flexible sound control
.
This makes bats a potentially powerful model species
for studying sound learning, a core trait of humans.
This work could further help shed light on how these circuits
go awry in communication barriers.
Overall, Yartsev's generalized approach focuses on interpreting the neural basis of natural behavior to reveal general principles
of brain function.
Previously, Yartsev received the 2019 Janett Rosenberg Trubatch Career Development Award and the 2013 Donald B.
Lindsley Award
in Behavioral Neuroscience.

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The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) is an organization
of basic scientists and clinicians who study the brain and nervous system.