Message from Our Director

Annual Message from Our Director

 -December 2025-

Ehud Isacoff

Ehud (Udi) Isacoff

Professor of Neuroscience and Molecular & Cell Biology
Director, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and Berkeley Brain Initiative (2013-present)
Co-director, Weill Neurohub East (2019-present)
Evan Rauch Chair in Neuroscience

This past year has been challenging with the uncertainty around federal funding for research. But despite these challenges, there is much to celebrate in the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute (HWNI) community! HWNI member John Clarke was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum tunneling, which laid the foundation for quantum computing. John also worked on MRI for brain imaging with scientists at HWNI’s Henry H. Wheeler, Jr. Brain Imaging Center and others at Berkeley, and we couldn’t be more thrilled for him! John is HWNI’s third Nobel laureate, after Randy Schekman and Eric Betzig. We are also so proud that HWNI member Teresa Puthussery was recently recognized with a 2025 MacArthur 'genius' award for her innovative research on the retina, which could one day help restore vision in people with vision loss.

In April 2025, we were pleased to hold the first-ever Carla and Corey Lecture with speaker Cori Bargmann, a renowned neuroscientist from The Rockefeller University. The Carla and Corey Lectureship Series was created through the generosity of co-founding directors of HWNI, Carla Shatz and Corey Goodman, along with Corey’s wife Marcia Barinaga. It was a great pleasure to hear Cori Bargmann talk about her groundbreaking research on the genetic and neural mechanisms underlying behavior, and to have her visit with our community. We are looking forward to bringing other fantastic speakers to campus in the future!

Last spring, we also hosted a special event featuring four generations of neuroscientists who had mentored each other, to discuss how neuroscience has evolved over the years. The speakers were Nobel laureate Torsten Wiesel (The Rockefeller University), Carla Shatz (Stanford University), HWNI member Marla Feller, and Berkeley Neuroscience PhD alum and Assistant Professor Anna Vlasits (University of Illinois). Thank you to Marla for arranging this interesting and unique event, which drew a packed house!

Goodman, Isacoff, Bargmann, and Shatz standing with their arms around each other in a lecture hall, smiling.

From left to right: Corey Goodman, Ehud Isacoff, Cori Bargmann, and Carla Shatz at the inaugural Carla and Corey Lecture. Photo by Keegan Houser.

This past summer, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of HWNI’s Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience with a day-long event that brought more than 100 alums, current researchers, and other leaders in science and technology to campus to reconnect and discuss the future of theoretical neuroscience. The Redwood Center was one of the earliest centers for theoretical neuroscience, and over the past 20 years it has made significant contributions not only to neuroscience, but also to machine learning and AI. We are grateful to founder Jeff Hawkins (inventor of the PalmPilot) for gifting the center to UC Berkeley all those years ago, and look forward to the discoveries and advances that will be made by Redwood Center researchers in the future.

Among the speakers at the Redwood Center’s anniversary celebration were new HWNI members Liberty Hamilton and Alex Huth on their very first day as faculty members at UC Berkeley. Liberty and Alex are alums of the Berkeley Neuroscience PhD Program, and we are thrilled to have them back! We are also excited to welcome new HWNI faculty member Gopala Anumanchipalli. In August, we welcomed our new HWNI manager, Kristin Nichols, as well as the newest group of Berkeley Neuroscience PhD students. We are so happy to have you all as part of our community!

HWNI scientists are extraordinarily innovative, and their “outside of the box” thinking and collaborations across disciplines have led to many exciting discoveries and technological advances this year. From developing a new method of controlling seizures in brain tissue from epilepsy patients, to building a new platform that can control what people see (including a color never seen by humans before!) to better understand vision and visual disorders, our researchers have come up with incredibly creative ways to uncover the workings of the brain and mind. This year our scientists have made important discoveries about the neural mechanisms underlying long-term memory, perception of optical illusions, hormone regulation during sleep, friendship formation and maintenance, and eating behavior — to name just a few. They have generated new insights into human decision-making, productivity, and reasoning, and created new brain MRI methods which will advance research and could lead to new ways to diagnose and treat neurological conditions. I am so proud of the brilliant work of all of my colleagues. You can read about these discoveries and more on our HWNI news page.

HWNI faculty have received many prestigious honors and awards this year because of their phenomenal work. Diana Bautista and Lexin Li were named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, David Schaffer was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and Yang Dan was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Rich Ivry won the Andrew Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences, Noah Whiteman was awarded the Genetics Society of America Medal, and Michael Yartsev won the Richard Lounsbery Award from the National Academy of Sciences.

Markita Landry won both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a CITRIS Innovation Fellowship and AIC Award, and Yvette Fisher was named a Freeman Hrabowski Scholar and won a McKnight Scholar Award. James Olzmann was the winner of the Avanti Award in Lipids from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, was named an American Society for Cell Biology Fellow, and won a UC Berkeley Letters & Science Faculty Award. James also won a Molecular Therapeutics Initiative Innovator Award, which Jim Hurley and I also won for our respective projects.

This year, HWNI was pleased to grant two awards from the 2025 Rennie Fund for the Study of Epilepsy to HWNI members Preeya Khanna and Stephan Lammel. Our members also often work together, and this year HWNI members Lance Kriegsfeld and Linda Wilbrecht, along with other colleagues, won a ​​$4.5 million Discovery Grant for Research in Bipolar Disorder for a collaborative project led by Lance.

Additionally, Helen Bateup received a UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award, and postdoc Boaz Styr (Yartsev lab) won a Warren Alpert Distinguished Scholars Fellowship Award in Neuroscience. Andrew Dillin was named the editor-in-chief of Genes & Development and also created the new Center for Unmet, Rare and Emerging Diseases (CURED) at UC Berkeley. Congratulations to everyone on your achievements!

HWNI scientists also understand the importance of explaining their research to the general public. This year, Gül Dölen talked about her research on psychedelics on the show Radiolab, Linda Wilbrecht discussed how we can make better decisions as part of the College of Letters and Science's Salon Series, Noah Whiteman talked about his book Most Delicious Poison at an event on campus with fellow HWNI member Michael Silver, and Jack Gallant spoke at a screening of the Werner Herzog documentary “Theater of Thought”, which he also appeared in. These are just some examples of how our members share their work with the broader community, and we appreciate their efforts to educate and connect with the public.

For 2026, I wish us all a rewarding year of discovery, and new opportunities for celebration and connection.