2025 Early Career Scientists’ Achievements and Research Awards
SAN DIEGO — The (SfN) will honor seven early career researchers whose awards will be presented during 2025, SfN's annual meeting.
“Innovative thinking often comes from those just beginning their scientific journeys,” said SfN President John H. Morrison. “These early career researchers are advancing neuroscience through breakthroughs in nanoscale imaging, new computational methods, neuroplasticity, and more.”
Jennifer N. Bourne Prize in Neuronal and Synaptic Structure and Function: Gregg Wildenberg
The Jennifer N. Bourne Prize in Neuronal and Synaptic Structure and Function recognizes early career neuroscientists for outstanding work that advances our understanding of synapses in neural circuits and connectomics at the nanometer scale. Named for the late Jennifer N. Bourne, PhD, an electron microscopist and core facility director who studied the structural plasticity of synapses, the award honors early-career tenure-track neuroscientists or non-tenure-track research scientists at any stage of their career. The award is funded by Kristen M. Harris, PhD, and includes a $5,000 prize and complimentary registration and travel to SfN’s annual meeting.
This year’s Bourne Prize recipient is Gregg Wildenberg, PhD, a research assistant professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Chicago, with a joint appointment at Argonne National Laboratory. An active mentor of undergraduate and graduate students, Wildenberg is a technological innovator in the field of brain mapping, applying his expertise in molecular biology, genetics, and 3D nanoscale imaging to examine how neural circuits develop in healthy and dysfunctional brains. He helped establish the first-ever brain mapping center at Argonne National Laboratory. He has advanced multiple circuit mapping techniques, including large-volume serial electron microscopy (vEM) for synaptic-level mapping (connectomics) and X-ray microscopy. As co-inventor of a new electron microscopy method for 3D brain mapping (photoemission electron microscopy, PEEM; patent filed) that could become the fastest vEM tool, Wildenberg is paving the way to whole brain mapping in mice and other species, including humans. Wildenberg completed the largest set of neural circuit maps to compare the development of mouse and primate cortices. A future goal is to focus on identifying how and when neural circuitry goes awry, which he believes is important to our understanding of neural wiring defects and the development of therapies to prevent or redirect them before they become hardcoded in adulthood. Additionally, Wildenberg plans to continue developing PEEM for connectomics to fully realize the circuitry of whole mammalian brains for the first time.
Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral : Brendan Ito
Endowed by The Grass Foundation, the Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral recognizes an outstanding PhD thesis in the area of general behavioral neuroscience. The award was established in 1979 in honor of Donald B. Lindsley, PhD, an early trustee of the Grass Foundation. The award includes a $5,000 prize and complimentary registration and travel to SfN’s annual meeting.
This year’s awardee is Brendan Ito, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Froemke Lab at the Institute at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. As a graduate student at Cornell University, Ito, working with Teja Bollu, led a project to develop new methods to track mouse tongue kinematics with decamicron-millisecond spatiotemporal precision as mice licked water from a spout. To test if mice can produce on-the-fly corrections during licking that are analogous to those studied in primate reach tasks, he pioneered a new behavioral paradigm to induce spout misses within single licks. Mice rapidly detected misses and re-aimed their tongues within the same movement, revealing online control during licking, and photoinhibition and electrophysiological recordings showed that the orofacial motor cortex was required for these corrections. Noticing that mice seemed to re-aim licks after off-center tongue-spout contacts, Ito developed a second task in which subtle, unexpected touches on the tongue guided subsequent licks toward the contact site. Surprisingly, touch-guided re-aiming did not require the orofacial motor or sensory cortex, but instead relied on the superior colliculus (SC), a midbrain structure classically associated with orienting. Using electrophysiology, viral tracing, and optogenetics, Ito, alongside Yongjie Gao, discovered a previously unknown topographically organized mechanosensory-to-motor map of the tongue in the SC where posterior SC activations evoke more temporal-directed licking and anterior sites evoke more nasal-directed licking. Together, Ito’s work, detailed in two first-author Nature articles, revealed fundamental principles for the control of movement. During his PhD studies, Ito mentored six other scientists, and he continues to mentor as a postdoctoral scholar.
Nemko Prize in Cellular or Molecular : Adam Lowet
The Nemko Prize in Cellular or Molecular , supported by the Nemko Family, recognizes a young neuroscientist’s outstanding PhD thesis advancing our understanding of molecular, genetic, or cellular mechanisms underlying higher brain function and cognition. The award includes a $2,500 prize and complimentary registration and travel to SfN’s annual meeting.
The 2025 awardee of the Nemko Prize is Adam Lowet, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. Lowet obtained his neuroscience PhD in 2025 from Harvard University, where his thesis investigated whether and how the striatum implements a novel computational method called distributional reinforcement learning (DRL). Whereas conventional reinforcement learning predicts only the mean reward, DRL models the entire distribution of rewards, which can substantially accelerate learning. Consistent with this idea, Lowet demonstrated that medium spiny neurons (MSNs) in the mouse striatum exhibit activity signatures of DRL. He used high-density electrophysiology (using Neuropixels probes with hundreds of recording sites for large-scale neural recording with single-cell resolution) and computational analyses to show that the striatum encodes complete probability distributions rather than their mean. Lowet formalized these theoretical efforts into the Reflected Expectile Distributional Reinforcement Learning Model, bridging computational and molecular neuroscience. He then verified the predictions of this model using cell type-specific lesions, two-photon calcium imaging through implanted gradient refractive index lenses, and depth-selective tapered fiber optogenetics, the last of which he conceptualized and constructed for the first time in the lab alongside an undergraduate mentee. His contributions could inform understanding of psychopathologies such as addiction and depression, in which value estimates are too optimistic or too pessimistic, respectively. During his time at Harvard, he was one of the executive directors of Harvard Medical School’s Health Professions Recruitment & Exposure Program, a postgraduate-led program aimed at recruiting Boston-area high schoolers into science and medicine.
Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award in : Lingxiao Shao, Maitreyee Wairagkar, and Ipshita Zutshi
The Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award in recognizes up to three early career neuroscientists for outstanding research and educational pursuits in an international setting. The awards are supported by the Gruber Foundation and each award includes a $25,000 prize and complimentary registration and travel to SfN’s annual meeting.
This year’s awardees are Lingxiao Shao, PhD; Maitreyee Wairagkar, MEng, PhD; and Ipshita Zutshi, PhD. These standout researchers are recognized for developing advanced technologies, forging new research paths, and combining myriad areas of expertise in their research that spans countries.
Shao is a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University in the laboratory of systems neuroscientist Alex Kwan. She completed her PhD studying the pathophysiological basis of anxiety disorders at Zhejiang University in China. After joining the Kwan Lab (then at Yale University) in late 2019, she was the first lab member to study psychedelics, forging a new research direction. Her research focuses on how psychoactive compounds (e.g., psilocybin, ketamine) can remodel neural circuitry. Her landmark 2021 study provided the first evidence of long-lasting structural plasticity following a single psilocybin dose in a mouse frontal cortex using longitudinal two-photon microscopy. One psilocybin dose increased spine density by 10%, driven by elevated spine formation — an increase that persisted for more than a month. Shao provided the first in vivo evidence that psychedelics can induce durable structural changes in the brain. Her follow-up project delineated cortical cell type- and receptor-specific mechanisms underlying these plasticity effects, showing that subcortical-projecting pyramidal tract neurons and the 5-HT2A (serotonin) receptor in these neurons are essential for psilocybin’s long-lasting effects. Her work leverages in vivo two-photon imaging, chemogenetics, and cell type-specific electrophysiology to investigate the circuit-level and cellular effects of psychedelics. This foundational research has sparked the study of the plasticity potential of psychedelic-inspired therapeutics for psychiatric disorders. Her contributions, detailed in two first-author publications and six co-authored papers, have advanced the understanding of how psychedelics reshape brain circuits and may inspire new therapeutic approaches.
Wairagkar, a project scientist in the Neuroprosthetics Lab at the University of California (UC), Davis, studies medical neuroprostheses to restore movement and speech in individuals with neurological injuries (e.g., stroke) or neurodegenerative diseases (e.g., amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Born in India, Wairagkar completed her undergraduate and graduate studies in the United Kingdom. Her graduate work at the University of Reading on predicting motion intention by monitoring the markers of dynamic reorganization of cortical activity improved the accuracy of motor brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). In her first postdoctoral position at Imperial College London, she developed affective social robots and conversational AI to help people with dementia. Now at UC Davis, she is developing intracortical BCIs (iBCIs) for restoring speech. For a man with ALS, Wairagkar reconstructed — with unprecedented accuracy — attempted speech based on the man’s neural signals recorded from chronic microelectrode arrays implanted in the motor cortex (the BrainGate2 clinical trial, patented technology licensed by a BCI startup). He was able to speak through a computer in his pre-ALS voice, modulate his pitch, and even sing simple melodies using Wairagkar’s “brain-to-voice” iBCI, the first closed-loop naturalistic voice synthesis neuroprosthesis. Wairagkar led the first exploration of how pitch and intonation are encoded in the human motor cortex at the precise resolution of neuronal action potentials, decoding these signals in real-time to enable modulation of synthesized voices. An active mentor, Wairagkar has seven first-author publications and has been recognized for her work with honors including first place in the 2023 International BCI Award.
Zutshi, a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience at New York University (NYU) Langone Health, studies how hippocampal circuits interact with the cortex to transform sensory inputs into internal signals that support planning, decision-making, and memory during goal-directed navigation. As an undergraduate in India, Zutshi received an award from the Khorana Program for Scholars, which enabled her to conduct research in the United States. Her graduate work at the University of California, San Diego, examined how the medial septum influences hippocampal function. Using optogenetics, she showed that altering the frequency of theta oscillations affects spike timing and working memory without disrupting spatial tuning. She also used optogenetics to selectively manipulate superficial cortical layers in mice and demonstrated that computations in local entorhinal cortex circuits are critical for generating grid cells but not other functional cell types, such as head direction cells. Her PhD research was supported by a Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Student Research Fellowship. For her postdoctoral research, Zutshi examined how entorhinal inputs and local hippocampal circuits shape spatial tuning and oscillatory features. To investigate how task demands affect hippocampal representations, she designed an innovative auditory-guided navigation task in mice and found that neuronal activity was driven more strongly by preparation for action than by external sensory inputs. In her time at NYU, Zutshi has mentored six students, published three first-author publications, and co-authored an additional three publications. Zutshi has also received several awards, including a Leon Levy Scholarship in and the Simons Foundation Fellows-to-Faculty Award, and was a finalist for the 2025 Blavatnik Regional Awards.
SfN Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Young Investigator Award: Li Ye
The SfN Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Young Investigator Award recognizes the outstanding achievements and contributions of early career neuroscientists who demonstrate scholarly independence. The award is supported by the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute and includes a $25,000 prize and complimentary registration and travel to SfN’s annual meeting.
This year’s recipient is Li Ye, PhD, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and N. Paul Whittier Chair in Chemistry and Chemical Biology at the Scripps Research Institute. Ye’s research focuses on the complex interactions between the nervous system and somatic tissue, pioneering techniques that set new gold standards for studying neural activity in behavior and physiology. During his postdoctoral work, Ye was an early adopter who combined brain-clearing technologies with activity-dependent labeling strategies to enable high-resolution 3D imaging of intact neural circuits based on behavioral experiences. Subsequently, he developed an AAV-based and projection-specific activity mapping CAPTURE system (CLARITY-based Activity and Projection Tracking upon Recombination) and a whole-body tissue clearing method, HYBRID (hydrogel-based reinforcement of DISCO), both of which further enabled the interrogation of ultra-long-range brain-body communication in entire mammals. More recently, Ye developed CATCH (clearing-assisted tissue click chemistry), which enabled high-resolution, multiplexable in situ chemical imaging to visualize drug engagement in the brain. Ye used these new technologies to study energetic communications between the brain and body under various physiological and disease conditions. These new models and discoveries not only uncover principles underlying brain functions with bottom-up inputs but also have broad implications for many peripheral and neurological diseases. Ye has received the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, the NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Ben Barres Award for transforming how researchers visualize and analyze brain structure and function.
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The (SfN) is an organization of nearly 30,000 basic scientists and clinicians who study the brain and the nervous system.
