Message from Our Director

Annual Message from Our Director

 -December 2024-

Ehud Isacoff

Ehud (Udi) Isacoff

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

2024 was a historic year for neuroscience at UC Berkeley with the official launch of the Department of Neuroscience in July, followed by a ribbon cutting and celebration in August. For the first time ever, neuroscience spanning the entire range of the field — from molecules to behavior and cognition, including computational neuroscience and neurotechnology — has a departmental home at UC Berkeley. The Neuroscience department has already launched a new undergraduate major in neuroscience, and has over 30 faculty members and more than 200 postdoctoral researchers, PhD students, and laboratory staff. 

The Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute (HWNI) and its members were instrumental in the creation of this new academic department, particularly Dan Feldman, who is the Neuroscience department’s inaugural chair. As the director of HWNI and a member of the new department, I know that we will continue to work closely together to support neuroscience research and education on campus. HWNI will continue to serve as an interdepartmental institute for neuroscience at UC Berkeley, promoting cross-campus neuroscience research and sponsoring scientific events, major research initiatives, and research and technology centers. The Department of Neuroscience has adopted the Neuroscience PhD Program, but the program continues to be run jointly with HWNI and serves both Neuroscience and HWNI faculty. I am so excited that we achieved this important milestone, which will greatly help us advance interdisciplinary neuroscience research and education on campus!

In celebration of the launch of the new department, HWNI’s co-founders, Carla Shatz and Corey Goodman, along with Corey’s wife Marcia Barinaga, have made gifts to endow a major annual lectureship in neuroscience at UC Berkeley. Starting in 2025, the Carla & Corey Lectureship will bring outstanding neuroscientists to campus to share their research and to engage with our deeply interdisciplinary scientific community, across the breadth of mind and brain science. We are tremendously grateful to Carla, Corey, and Marcia for their generous and sustained support of neuroscience at UC Berkeley!

Inaugural chair Dan Feldman cuts the ribbon to open the Neuroscience Department. Photo by Peony Yu.

This past year, HWNI members have made many important discoveries and scientific advances across the field of neuroscience. Some have been developing and using computational approaches, including artificial intelligence and machine learning tools, to uncover hidden patterns in large and complex neuroscience data sets, and even modeling all the connections in the fly brain. These projects have generated numerous new findings from the basics of how neural circuits function, to how patient outcomes can be better predicted after traumatic brain injury. Other discoveries our members have made this year could have implications for understanding and treating Alzheimer’s disease, other neurodegenerative diseases, eye diseases, autism spectrum disorder, and speech disorders. Additionally, HWNI members have made discoveries about how the nervous system evolved, how the human brain represents emotional content, and even how the nervous system might help fight infectious disease. You can read about these research discoveries and more on our news page. I am so proud of all the incredibly innovative work our members do to understand the mind, brain, and the rest of the nervous system, and to facilitate the development of much-needed new treatments for patients.

Because of their outstanding work, HWNI faculty have received many prestigious honors and awards this year. Doris Tsao won both the 2024 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience and the 2024 António Champalimaud Vision Award, Yang Dan won the 2024 Peter Seeburg Integrative Neuroscience Prize, and Bob Knight won the 2024 American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions. Michael Yartsev was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and also won a 2024 Boehringer Ingelheim FENS Research Award. Mark D'Esposito and James Hurley were both elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and James was additionally selected for the SPARK NS Parkinson’s Disease Translational Research Program. Markita Landry was named the 2024 Laureate in Chemical Sciences of the Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists, and was also included in the Atlas of Inspiring Hispanic/Latinx Scientists along with HWNI research scientist Miriam Hernández-Morales. Andrea Gomez won a 2024 McKnight Scholar Award, and was also chosen as one of 10 “Scientists to Watch” by Science News.

We were pleased to award the 2024 Rennie Fund for the Study of Epilepsy, which is administered by HWNI, to HWNI faculty member Na Ji and her collaborator at UCSF, Jeanne Paz. Another collaboration, which includes HWNI members Helen Bateup and David Schaffer, was awarded $12M to uncover genetic pathways in autism from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. In other achievements this year, Silvia Bunge published a developmental cognitive neuroscience textbook, and Lexin Li was named the editor-in-chief of the Annals of Applied Statistics.

Some of our postdoctoral fellows also won awards this year, including Angelo Forli (Yartsev lab) who won a 2024 Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award in Neuroscience, and Lamiae Abdeladim (Adesnik lab) and Natsumi Komatsu (Landry lab) who both won 2024 Career Awards at the Scientific Interface from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

Last but not least, some of our newest faculty members also received honors and awards this year. Meng-meng Fu and Preeya Khanna were both named 2024 Sloan Research Fellows, and Preeya also won an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. Meng-meng and Preeya joined us in HWNI this past year, along with Hedy Kober and Amitai Shenhav. We are thrilled to have these amazing scientists as part of our community! I would also like to extend a warm welcome to the newest cohort of Neuroscience PhD students, as well as all of the postdocs and other researchers who have joined us in the past year. I’m looking forward to all of the great discussions we will have and science we will do together!