The Gruber Foundation proudly presents the 2022 Neuroscience Prize to Larry Abbott, Emery Neal Brown, Terrence Sejnowski and Haim Sompolinsky for seminal contributions to computational and theoretical neuroscience. These fields are playing increasingly important roles in helping us understand the brain as datasets get so large and complex that they can no longer be grasped intuitively.
Bringing their expertise in physics, machine learning and statistics to neuroscience, each has generated theories, models and tools that are now widely used. Among them are: Abbott’s models of homeostatic plasticity, olfactory processing and learning in networks; Brown’s methods for decoding spike trains in behaving animals and analyzing synchronized oscillations during anesthesia; Sejnowski’s independent component analysis method for distributing complex data into separate channels; and Sompolinsky’s attractor and balanced state network models of complex circuit function.