Several prizes are awarded by the Cajal Club in different categories. The Krieg Cortical Kudos recognize outstanding scientists working on the cerebral cortex at three levels: the established investigator (Discoverer), the young professional who has received an advanced professional degree within the ten year period prior to the time of nomination (Explorer), and the recent PhD graduate no more than two years beyond obtaining their advanced degree (Scholar). Learn more on our Awards page, link below.
For his outstanding contributions to our understanding of the role that primary and secondary somatosensory cortex play in context-dependent sensory processing. His development of a platform for population-wide functional imaging combined with spatial transcriptomics has illuminated activity patterns across and local connectivity between cortical cell types.
Explorer
MICHAEL YARTSEV
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, UC BERKELEY
For his superb contributions to our understanding of the neuroscience of behavior, social learning, and anatomical pathways involved in group sociality and communication are recognized with this award. Remarkable and illuminating, his work on the bat studying complex spatial behavior cojoins efforts to assess neural activity, vocalizations, and social interactions from large groups of bats simultaneously. Photo credit, Adam Lau.
Discoverer
ALAIN CHÉDOTAL
RESEARCH DIRECTOR AND GROUP LEADER Director, VISION INSTITUTE/INSERM, PARIS
For his many superb contributions to our understanding of the development of circuitry in the hindbrain and cerebellum to and from the cortex, as well as his discovery and functional analysis of axon guidance receptors in these structures and in the spinal cord, are recognized by this award. Your employment of tissue clearing approaches to reveal unsuspected cellular organization of the brain and other tissues, as well as his elucidation of the evolution of bilateral visual projections in ancient fish, are in the spirit of the KCK award and of the Cajal Club itself. Photo credit, Lardhuin/Sorbonne Université/Institut de la Vision.
Discoverer
DENIS JABAUDON
PROFESSOR AND DIRECTOR, DEPARTMENT OF BASIC NEUROSCIENCES, UNIVERSITY OF GENEVA
For his outstanding contributions to our understanding of cortical development are recognized by this award. The generation and differentiation of specific subtypes of neocortical and thalamic neurons is driven by gene expression programs, which are probed by clever tools he developed in order to elucidate how sensory experience regulates these programs during development. His work showed how important both dynamic input-dependent and cell-intrinsic factors are for circuit assembly and how they change each other in the mammalian neocortex.
